Sorrow waited, sorrow won
Jan. 27th, 2015 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynTrying to write two stories, make a vid for Escapade, and thinking about other vids I want to make, and it all feels like too much. I got another one of those emails I get from time to time, where someone comments on how much they liked a story but they can't believe that it doesn't have more kudos/bookmarks, and that always depresses me something fierce. I know it's a lovely compliment that someone thinks your work deserves more, but it also starts to remind you, time after time, that you are in that situation.
It's a lot like when I was young and just starting out as a writer, and I'd send out stories that always came back with personal notes from the editors about the quality of the stories, along with the rejection that (usually) it wasn't what they were looking for. People in my writing group were always, wow, I never get personal notes from the editors! And I was like, yeah, you know, the first couple times it's cool, but then you realize that it's all still a rejection (after rejection, after rejection). The first time I ever got an acceptance, I almost threw it away, because I thought it was a note from the editor about the rejection.
I've been trying really hard to think about this wonderful post fromsperrywink and just concentrate on my own efforts to put forth what I want to see in the world, or think about destina making dolphin noises (waves at destina), but I do really get torpedoed sometimes. A lot lately, because I feel like I'm writing and vidding into a void--fandom's always been about participation and communication for me, and once I lost my fic website a couple years ago, all my fic's been on AO3. Try as I might, I've never been able to develop conversations with people there the way I have been on LJ/DW/email, or on Tumblr (I mean, certainly if you have a lot of followers on Tumblr, you could, but that's not my world). I've met a lot of great people in those spaces in the past, and even recently, because I wrote them a comment on their fic or vid, or they wrote to me, but it doesn't seem like you get that on Tumblr or on AO3, and a lot of those friends have been lost to attrition lately. Although, really, yeah, it could very well be a referendum on the quality of the work, and that's definitely the place my depression-mind goes to.
I think too the isolation of not having a lot of friends left/friends who are into the same thing I am compounds that. There are so many stories floating around in my head right now, so many vids, and it's a struggle to get past the why bother. Especially when I can't seem to get them to come out right, like the vid for Escapade feels (ugh, I keep looking at the timeline and wondering if I can ever make a good vid again, let alone a good Steve/Bucky vid) or the stories ("you're keeping the outfit" porn should not be this difficult!) have been lately.
I should probably shut the comments off on this, because people will think I'm fishing for compliments and I am not fishing for compliments, seriously, but I don't know, maybe there's someone else out there in the depresso-ball pit too who'd like a safe space to talk about that, so I guess I will keep them open. Or maybe you have some cool tricks, like sperrywink, to remind yourself that it's the creating that matters and you are more than welcome to share them with me.
It's a lot like when I was young and just starting out as a writer, and I'd send out stories that always came back with personal notes from the editors about the quality of the stories, along with the rejection that (usually) it wasn't what they were looking for. People in my writing group were always, wow, I never get personal notes from the editors! And I was like, yeah, you know, the first couple times it's cool, but then you realize that it's all still a rejection (after rejection, after rejection). The first time I ever got an acceptance, I almost threw it away, because I thought it was a note from the editor about the rejection.
I've been trying really hard to think about this wonderful post from
sperrywink and just concentrate on my own efforts to put forth what I want to see in the world, or think about destina making dolphin noises (waves at destina), but I do really get torpedoed sometimes. A lot lately, because I feel like I'm writing and vidding into a void--fandom's always been about participation and communication for me, and once I lost my fic website a couple years ago, all my fic's been on AO3. Try as I might, I've never been able to develop conversations with people there the way I have been on LJ/DW/email, or on Tumblr (I mean, certainly if you have a lot of followers on Tumblr, you could, but that's not my world). I've met a lot of great people in those spaces in the past, and even recently, because I wrote them a comment on their fic or vid, or they wrote to me, but it doesn't seem like you get that on Tumblr or on AO3, and a lot of those friends have been lost to attrition lately. Although, really, yeah, it could very well be a referendum on the quality of the work, and that's definitely the place my depression-mind goes to.I think too the isolation of not having a lot of friends left/friends who are into the same thing I am compounds that. There are so many stories floating around in my head right now, so many vids, and it's a struggle to get past the why bother. Especially when I can't seem to get them to come out right, like the vid for Escapade feels (ugh, I keep looking at the timeline and wondering if I can ever make a good vid again, let alone a good Steve/Bucky vid) or the stories ("you're keeping the outfit" porn should not be this difficult!) have been lately.
I should probably shut the comments off on this, because people will think I'm fishing for compliments and I am not fishing for compliments, seriously, but I don't know, maybe there's someone else out there in the depresso-ball pit too who'd like a safe space to talk about that, so I guess I will keep them open. Or maybe you have some cool tricks, like sperrywink, to remind yourself that it's the creating that matters and you are more than welcome to share them with me.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-30 05:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-30 08:25 am (UTC)I wonder though, what you say about designing the tools -- if we were to take the things about Tumblr and Twitter that make them more of a draw than Livejournal, to create something better, what would they be? The speed and the transitoriness of those platforms seem to be the biggest thing but also the thing that doesn't work for fandom. I can't say much about Twitter because I incredibly don't get it and I can't say anything hardly worth bothering with in a sentence, but is it the images and graphic-heaviness on tumblr? If you took those and made it possible to repost images and vids but to have embedded comment threads and real communication for text posts? Made private conversations possible? What could we alter to make it work for us?
(Or is the reason for the mass-migration only and simply because everyone else is on those platforms and the wider audience? Because if that's so, there's probably not a lot to be done even if someone could build a fandom-friendly forum...)
I think that's the transitoriness -- the way things disappear in a blink -- that's taking away from the ability to bond and have meaningful interaction -- and also causing a problem with responsibility for what's said or done in that environment. And those seem built into the tools, I don't know if they can be separated from them; separated from the way most people seem to prefer doing things now. I wonder if there really is a possibility for an upcoming platform that can fix things for all needs, or if it's something to do with that here-and-gone attention span of the wider world, that we'll never get back to the kind of things that worked for fandom being popular again?
Ah, that probably sounds way more insulting than I mean it to. I'm just brainstorming.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-04 07:10 am (UTC)That's probably a big minus of DW and LJ for a lot of people--the fact that it's more text based. So I would imagine it'd have to have that ease of reblogging/passive quality and also be more conducive to graphics.
But I also don't know how you'd bring in that teen audience, who are producing a lot of this stuff. I have this weird feeling that we're dividing more and more along those age and experience lines and that that choice of platform reflects that. I don't know. I could be really wrong about that, being an Old.
But yeah, that transitoriness is really...it's just not good. It doesn't foster community and I wonder sometimes if fandom can really survive without community. It just becomes more about people squealing about something to each other and then moving on, never to be a unit again.
Ugh, now I'm depressed all over again.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-04 07:38 am (UTC)I'll probably come back to this discussion because just at a glance and I have no time right now some interesting things are being said, but just for now -- I make gifs (made a point of learning because anything like that is a shiny challenge :) ) and I could just as easily post them to LJ/DW as tumblr, all it takes is a little bit of html.
The reason I don't is because I tend to think that people on this platform want the text heaviness, that maybe they're sticking to LJ because they don't have the great internet connection or computer, and I certainly know that I avoid tumblr when I'm on my home internet because I just don't have the GB per month to check it properly, it eats it up like nothing else.
Yet I could post the gifs here. Either linking from tumblr or using LJs gallery. It works, I've done it once under a cut. It wouldn't have the reblogging facility, but LJ can also be that visual medium. Maybe I should make a post about this question and see what people following my own journal think...