The Trouble With Fan-Fic (The Mandalorian)

 I promise this blog post is not a secret cry for help in the grand style of posting something you'd never say in order to signal that you need rescue.

I love fan fiction.  It's where I started writing and it's still my comfort go-to place when I need to recapture the fun and creativity of storytelling.  I wouldn't have gotten through my depression in the last six months without fan fiction, both reading and writing.

That doesn't mean there aren't problems.  Or rather one specific problem.

At the end of October, Season 2 of The Mandalorian will be released on Disney Plus.  Those who know me know that I adored that series.  As in "I will not shut up about it", "I have a major crush on Pablo Pascal" and "relentless search for the action figures" levels of adoration.

So, not a big surprise that the 8 episodes of Season 1 weren't enough for me.  I started doing little vignettes and scenelets almost as soon as the credits on Chapter 8: Redemption rolled.  (For the curious, I decided the story needed a romance and that a Force-sensitive Kaylee-type character (from Firefly) would be the perfect match for Din and the Child.)  But I kept it light because I'd already learned a major downside of writing fan-fic while a series is ongoing: it makes it harder to appreciate the new official material.

In ordinary times, I would be jumping up and down levels of excitement at the prospect of Season 2.  But instead I find myself hesitant.  I ended up delving deep into my own version of The Mandalorian universe because that was the only thing I ended up being able to write while I was trying to cope with the pandemic, my family, and my own mental health.  

I've got about 80k worth of a story full of adventure and romance.  I feel like I know that universe's characters as thoroughly as my own.  I have a backstory for Din, a rivalry with other members of the Order, and a slightly less than canonical view of whether the Mandalorian's vows are to never remove the helmet or to never let another living being see his face.  I made the enclave on Navarro just one of several Mandalorian sanctuaries.  I explored what the Mandalorians do with the foundlings they rescue and created my own society of masked space pirates.

So, yeah, safe to say that I invested a lot of imagination and thought into it.

But now I'm faced with knowing that the official writers will almost certainly not have created a version of the story that matches with what I wrote.  Which means mentally sundering one or the other from what I consider to be the "real" story.  (This has happened to me before.  I had some fantastic ideas for Fringe, and as a result, I don't acknowledge Season 5 in my own personal canon.  Ditto X-Men 3, which contradicted my two X-men fan-fic novels which were written after X-2.)

In the great scheme of things, it's not a huge problem.  In fact, it's a very privileged problem to have.  Oh, poor me, too many great stories.

At the same time, it's an illustration of how connected fans can become with worlds that other people have created.  Fandoms are more than just a place where people who all like a particular show, book, or movie can gather.  Those stories become real to us in a way that can be hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced.  We integrate parts of ourselves into those universes, sometimes directly by creating characters who are stand-ins for ourselves, and sometimes by creating our own pieces of the stories.  By claiming a place for ourselves, we become a part of those universes.

Imagination and stories have always been a vital part of the human experience.  And I suspect that making ourselves part of those stories has been a part of the process from the beginning.  It's how we make sense of the world, by telling stories about our experiences and how we wish the world would be.

In my case, that's in a world with a sexy single dad bounty hunter, but your world might be different.

Previous post: Reclaiming My HEA: Choose Your Hotties

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Reclaiming My HEA: Pick Your Hotties

 Reclaiming My HEA is a regular monthly feature on this blog, sharing my experiences as I go through the process of a divorce after twenty years of marriage and adjust to being single again in my forties.

It's been awhile since I wrote about this and I've been through a lot.  As many of you may know, due to the circumstances with our children, my ex-husband and I decided to continue to share our family home so that our kids could continue to have access to both of us.  It's been a difficult decision (though I'm still convinced it was the right one) and doing it during a pandemic has been especially challenging. (I speak about the challenges of sharing a house with my ex in the previous Reclaiming My HEA.)

One thing that has been helpful is working with a therapist to deal with the internalized messages that are stuck in my head.  It's hard for me to believe that others might find me attractive, and since I've been having to deal with just about everything at home on my own, asking for help isn't something that occurs to me.

My therapist had a good idea.  Since I am a romance writer, she suggested I try to change my internal messaging by writing little scenes that feature my own happily-ever-after.  She suggested I pick a celebrity as my hero and imagine a future where I don't have to worry about money and have a devoted and caring partner.

Imagine a hot guy hanging around my house?  Yeah, I can do that.

As I considered my options, I thought that it might be fun to share some snippets on this blog.

First step, I'll have to pick my celebrity.  This is a little odd for me.  I'm used to crushing on characters, not the people who play them.  With the character, I'm not stuck with any less than awesome real life traits and I can ignore any real-world spouses or families with a clear conscience.

(And for the record, this is meant to be inspiration and entertainment, with zero intention of making any person feel awkward or imposed on, especially the chosen celebrity or their families and friends.  If this does happen to cross anyone's screen, I hope they'll understand that I am using their likeness as a shorthand for the kind of person I am hoping to one day find love with, not a declaration of hoping for them specifically.)

That said, here are the gentlemen I'm considering.  Votes and opinions welcome!

Brendan Fraser.  He was the go-to hot and nice guy in the late nineties and early 2000s.  I absolutely developed a crush on his character in The Mummy and The Mummy Returns.  And I'm probably one of the few people who absolutely loved Bedazzled.  He's a fellow Canadian and I can't recall ever hearing anyone say something bad about working with him.  I could see him as an enthusiastic, energetic guy, the sort who is always up to try something new.

Brandon Routh.  He is my all time favourite Superman, and I adore his Ray Palmer in DC's Legends of Tomorrow.  I have heard that he is a fellow geek and RPG player, which would be awesome.  In my imagination, I would assume that he shares his character's love of musicals.  Again, he's one of those actors whom everyone seems to love working with.

Keanu Reeves.  I can't think of a single Reeves role that I didn't love: Matrix, Speed, Constantine, John Wick, To The Bone, even Bill and Ted.  He is notoriously sweet and kind, to the point that Romancelandia has adopted him wholeheartedly.  I like to think of him as a curl up together in front of a fire, each with a book kind of guy.

Tempted though I am, reverse-harem is not an option for this particular exercise (I checked).

Any of these gentlemen would be a worthy romantic hero (or at least the versions of them that I'm imagining), so, readers, what do you think?

Previous Post: Trying Something New: Audiobooks

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Trying Something New - Audiobooks

 This week, for the first time in a very long time, I actually managed to do some writing on the second Special Investigations book.  It took just about every anti-writers-block trick in my repetoire (writing fan fiction to jumpstart my creativity, giving myself a block of several hours without my kids, outlining, brainstorming, reviewing previous chapters, etc) and it wasn't a ton of words but it was something.

But the thing I'm actually excited about is that I'm moving toward something I've wanted to do for a really long time: getting my books out in audio.

I've set up a recording booth in my closet and I've given a shot at narrating the first few chapters.  It's been more of a challenge than I expected and I thought I'd share a little bit of the process.

First, I need to shout out a big thank you to my brother-in-law, Ned, who is an incredibly talented voice actor.  He gave me some good advice on performance and setting up my own in-home studio in an affordable way.  Specifically, using duvets as anti-sound reflectors instead of having to buy fancy padded foam inserts.  And using a touch screen to scroll through the text so that there are no sounds of rustling papers and button clicking on the recording.

I got myself a microphone and blithely began recording.  I knew I had a tendency for clumsy tongue stumbling, so I knew I'd have to re-record sections regularly.  One suggestion was to make sure to leave a significant blank (3 seconds) before starting again so that the gap would be easily identifiable when editing.  That worked better than I'd expected, so I'd highly recommend it to anyone wanting to give this a try themselves.

I'd recorded ten chapters and was feeling pretty pleased with myself when I realized that I'd misread the technical requirements that Findaway needs for audio recordings.  All of my recordings were far too quiet.

O-kay.  Disappointing but not crushing.  Until I realized that my fancy new microphone's levels were maxed out.  The only way I could meet the volume requirements was to have my mouth right next to the microphone, which introduced me to the wonderful new world of plosives.

Plosives are sounds that include a rush of air (b, p, t, etc.).  Put your hand in front of your mouth and you'll feel the exhalation as you say them.  When you say them directly in front of a microphone, you get a staticy-pop from the air hitting the surface.  Incidentally, this is why most microphones have a foam cover and vocalists usually have a pop filter (a nylon screen) in front of the microphone as well.

I was caught in a bind: to get the volume I needed, I had a plosive problem.  If I used the pop filter and foam cover to reduce the plosives, the recording was too quiet.

Well, crap.  I spent weeks testing different placements and combinations.  None worked.  So I needed to find a new microphone option.

Luckily, I found one: my son's gamer headset.  I could place the microphone just below my mouth, which let the plosive rush of air pass over it instead of hitting it.  I tried recording the first two chapters again and they met the technical requirements.  Yay, success!

Next challenges: editing the chapters to send them to my beta listeners and figuring out times when it will be reliably quiet to do more recordings.  (The duvets are great at preventing echoes and closed doors do a lot to subdue household sounds, but they will not stop the sound of a couple of excited kids shouting at their screens.  Voice of experience, trust me.)

It takes me about half an hour to record a chapter.  The actual chapter is about 8-12 minutes but I end up having to repeat a lot to get a good recording.  There are 45 chapters to record in the first book, so this is going to take awhile.  I can't record more than 1-2 chapters in a day or more than 5 in a week without stressing my voice.

But it's a start.  And it's helping my mood, since I feel like I'm making progress on something career related.  There will probably be more breaks because that's how life works with depression, but I'm going to keep plowing forward.

I'm Not Okay (And That's Okay)

As may be guessed from the extended silence on this blog since March, things haven't been going well.  I'm giving myself permission to admit that I'm not okay and I haven't been okay for awhile.

My life was difficult even before the COVID pandemic hit.  I often felt as if I were standing on a slowly submerging platform, holding heavy weights of responsibilities.  There were many times when the best I felt I could hope for was that I could keep my children afloat while I slowly drowned.  I was dealing with depression, engaged in a war of attrition with my local school board to give my 16yo the supports he needed (a battle that had already lasted 5 years as of September 2019), watching my 20 year marriage dissolve and facing financial and personal insecurity, and also deal with the usual challenges of raising teenagers, paying bills, and, oh yeah, writing books.

With COVID, I suddenly found myself unemployed and trying to manage four people sharing a house (including my ex-husband, which is a whole other area of stress and challenge).  I became a teacher, a peacekeeper (in the military sense, guarding borders to keep my two kids from launching attacks on one another), a therapist, and an activities coordinator.  Almost everything that we relied on for engagement for my older son was suddenly off-limits (no bus rides, no trips to ride cool elevators, and no swimming in public pools).  My youngest was worried about the world in general and needed reassurance that this was not the beginning of the End Times while also getting recognition that his feelings were important and shouldn't be denied (my parental attempt to assure I don't pass on the requirement for a Pollyanna mask that I was required to wear as a child).

Like many people, I also found myself responsible for managing my parents.  I recently saw a meme which introduced a child as the "emotional support daughter" and that was the role I found myself in, listening to frustrations from both of them.  (I have at least learned not to attempt to provide solutions or suggestions for the most part, which often created greater conflict in the past.)  They were intensely social before the pandemic and while they recognized the seriousness of what happened, they were lonely and needed social support.

As "March Break" stretched from one week to three to the rest of the school year, I found myself becoming physically and emotionally exhausted.  My creativity crashed and I was so tired that I was often sleeping more than 14 hours a day.  I couldn't watch television or movies.  I couldn't read books.  Everything seemed impossibly difficult.

I reached out for help and began working with my doctor and a therapist to adjust my medications and thinking.  I began rewatching and rereading old favourites and discovered that much of my anxiety around consuming stories was centered around **new** stories where I didn't know what was going to happen.  With stuff I'd already seen and read, I could get the necessary mental escape but didn't have the underlying anxiety of wondering if I was going to hit something that would plunge me into a bad mental space.

I tried different creative outlets, painting and sewing.  I changed my daily meditation from sitting quietly to listening to music and letting my thoughts wander.  I wrote fan fiction, bringing me back to the fandoms and universes that I've always loved and found inspiring.

Those things all helped.  But I'm still in a fragile place and one of the biggest things I need to be careful of is my twin lifelong tendencies to refuse to admit that anything is wrong and to push ahead beyond my limits.  (Yay, history of Perfectionism!)  This post is my way of not falling into that trap.

There are a lot of things that are still wrong.  There are many days when I feel completely invisible, like a machine that runs the household rather than a person.  I desperately miss having a sense of romantic and emotional attachment with another person, of being important to someone else.  (Not to dash the hopes of any second-chance-romance fans out there, but that connection died a long time ago with me and my ex-husband.)  I am faced with the reality that I will be caring for my oldest child for the rest of my life, and given how the autism support structure has been gutted in Ontario, there is little to no chance of ever being able to live solely for myself at any time in the future.  I'm worried about money and being able support myself and my children.  I'm terrified about the state of the world and the ugliness that seems to be swallowing our hopes faster than we can ignite them.

In being open about the challenges I'm facing, I'm hoping that my readers will understand and be patient with the fact that for the foreseeable future, I will be quieter and less productive than I have been in the past.  It isn't because I don't want to share the stories which still linger in my head, because I do.  I still love my characters and their adventures.  I want them all to have their happily ever afters.

I know many of you are facing similar (and sometimes worse) challenges and are looking for your own mental escape into a world where we know that no matter how bad things seem at the moment, our dreams will always win.  I don't have the same faith that we live in that world anymore, but I do still believe in creating a world where that happens.  If it needs to be fiction for now, so be it.  Maybe we'll find our way into making it real eventually.

Meanwhile, it's okay to not be okay.  It's okay to admit it.  It's okay to ask for help.  We don't need to be strong and risk breaking.  Individual strands can carry more when they're braided together.  We can all be not okay together, giving ourselves room to be angry, upset, and all the other feelings that we should feel when things aren't okay.

I'm not okay.  And if you're not okay, either, then that's okay.  Okay?

Heroine Fix: Praising Difficult Women (Phantom of the Opera)

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been dealing with a lot of personal challenges.  One of my coping mechanisms is music.  And drama.  Which is how I ended up watching three different versions of The Phantom of the Opera.  And listening to one more (because not listening to Colm Wilkenson's Phantom is just wrong).  Now, I adore the interplay of music and tragi-romance that Andrew Lloyd Webber created.  When I'm depressed, the melodrama can be cathartic.

When I was a kid, I empathized with the character of Christine.  I admired her beauty and the beauty of her voice.  I was thrilled with the adventure of being lured beneath the opera house by a mysterious masked man with a gorgeous voice.  And I thought it was wonderful that her childhood sweetheart (a viscount, no less!) was in love with her and would risk everything to be with her.

But this time, as I watched the various versions, I found myself more sympathetic toward the character Carlotta, the prima donna soprano of the Paris Opera house and the woman who is Christine's professional obstacle.  She's usually portrayed as unpleasantly demanding and wracked with petty jealousy toward Christine.  The audience is supposed to want Christine to replace her.

It's a fairly typical dyad.  Christine, the virginal, humble, sweet, and pure, is "not like other girls" with that specific role being played by Carlotta, who is worldly, wealthy, and aware of her own talent.  Christine is the Madonna.  Carlotta, it is implied, is the whore.

I found myself asking: why are Carlotta's attributes so easily portrayed as bad?

There's actually a fair bit to admire in the character.  She is an independent woman, which is a rarity in 1898 Paris.  She is a professional, which is even rarer.  She's been the prima donna of the Paris Opera House for five years when the story begins.  Which means she's quite good at her job, since performing women have always faced the frequent churn of being replaced by younger performers.  Based on what we see, she's quite wealthy.  She has her own home, at least two servants, and very expensive custom clothing.  So she is a successful, skilled, and resourceful woman.

To be fair, there's no doubt that she's pretty unpleasant toward her coworkers, both the other performers and the stagehands.  She orders them about and expects to be catered to, not to mention throwing a tantrum and walking away from a performance.

However, there may be some unexplored justification for her attitude.

One of the first scenes we see with Carlotta is when she's performing the aria "Think of Me" for the new Opera managers.  During her performance, she is knocked down by a heavy canvas backdrop.  The managers dismiss the incident, saying "These things do happen..."

This is the last straw for our diva.  She screams at them that these things have been happening to her for the last three years and until they stop happening, she won't be performing at the Paris Opera.  It's a single line that's quickly passed over and not mentioned again.  The narrative focus shifts to giving Christine her big break.

Still, the line made me think.  If it's true, then for the last three years, the Phantom has been making the Paris Opera increasingly unpleasant for Carlotta in the hopes that she will quit and provide an opportunity to Christine.  It doesn't take much imagination to realize how unpleasant it would be to be unpredictably subjected to sabotage and disruption.  Especially since any plea for a fix has clearly been dismissed.  She's being gaslit by those in authority around her, which would make anyone irritable and demanding even without the Phantom's attacks.

Carlotta's jealousy and irritability can be explained by the situation she's in.  She's jealous of Christine because she's very aware that her career and livelihood are dependent on being able to perform.  She doesn't want to give up the position she's worked so hard to achieve.

And I have to admit, I don't find being demanding and being aware of one's own talents to be negative traits.  These are usually only portrayed as undesirable in women.  Masculine characters are allowed to be difficult, rude, and arrogant.  They're even admired for it.

Carlotta is villainized because the audience needs to feel better about Christine taking over her job.  If we see Carlotta as unworthy and unlikable, then we don't have to question whether Christine should have any moral concerns about accepting the results of the Phantom's harassment.  It also allows Christine to be passive, reinforcing her purity.  It's a narrative choice and one that many authors have made over the years.

But it's not an inevitable one.  Feminine characters don't have to be pitted against one another.  One doesn't have to lose in order for the audience to feel good about the other winning.

I would greatly love to see a version where Christine is ambitious instead of passive.  Where she recognizes Carlotta's talent and the two have a mentor-mentee relationship.  That would be a refreshing switch.  Heck, I'd love it if the two of them would pair up against the Phantom because Christine realizes he's been manipulating her and that what he's doing to Carlotta is wrong.

Difficult women shouldn't be automatically dismissed as unworthy of a happy ending.  They should be celebrated for daring to take up space that society says they shouldn't.  We should all be more willing to take up space.

Update: June 1 to 13

I didn't track my words but I have another couple chapters done for Until Proven Guilty.  And I've been working on polishing the plot for Best Face Forward in the hopes that maybe an agent or editor will want the manuscript.  It's a weird position to be in, since the story was rejected by Entangled but also got two scores of 98/100 and 99/100 in the contest.

I'm still struggling to find time and energy to write.  But I mean that in both senses of the word.  It's harder than it usually is but I'm still trying.

Weekly Update: May 24-30 (and contest news!)

Weekly word count: 1389 words

A good week of writing for me.  I'm pleased with my progress.

But the really exciting news is that I finaled in the Stiletto Contest with my contemporary romance, Best Face Forward.  This was a big ego-boost after the story was rejected from Entangled (it was a nice rejection, but still a rejection).  The final round of the contest is judged by editors and agents, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that someone likes it.

Life is still challenging.  Here in Ontario, the schools will be closed until September and the summer camps that I would usually send my kids to are not going to be running.  I'm still trying to figure out what I'll do, though a lot will depend on whether or not my day job starts back up.  But so far, we've been managing.

Hope everyone has been able to do the same.