Snowflake challenge day 10
Jan. 16th, 2016 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynDay 10
In your own space, post a rec for fannish and/or creative resources and spaces. Tell us where you go to dig up canon facts for your fandom, or where you get all the juicy details about your favorite ship. Where do you like to hang out and squee like a squeeing thing? Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
So,minim_calibre posted some great resources here and I'm just gonna say you should go look at hers. killabeez also has posted some great resources.
But me? I don't have a lot of things that I can rec people, because my research is often so idiosyncratic and centered around what I want to write that I can't imagine it being of use to anyone. For instance, I wanted to fill the prompt in the kissing meme for Steve/Bucky, baseball, which led me to look up casual baseball leagues in the '30s in NYC, and uniforms, and then that started me down a road toward which year the Dodgers might be playing a double-header on Steve's birthday, which led me to Bucky Walters, the famous pitcher back then, and television (finding out the first televised baseball game ever was the date when Bucky Walters pitched against the Dodgers in Brooklyn), which led me to an idea for baseball being played by soldiers in WWII so I started researching the where, when, and how of it. I can't imagine anyone else caring about that sort of research, so...
And I don't belong to any prompt communities or things that are designed to inspire writers, though sometimes I wish I could be. I tend to avoid those, because I know a lot of people who like sex kink and rape stories post there, and I really fucking hate seeing that stuff show up in front of my eyes because then I'm stuck with their summaries in my head for days and it's very upsetting. I loved the kissing fest that such heights put on last February, because the prompts were so interesting and fun. But I tend to stick with my little corner.
I will say that, much as I hate Tumblr as a tool because I think it's the most poorly designed website ever and it just keeps getting worse and worse to use, I've gotten a lot of fic ideas out of it. Meta and art and photography have sometimes been inspirational; and there's the squee factor, writ large. I know it was a huge portion of what made the summer of 2014 so spectacular for me, because at the time I was watching the movie every week in the theatre I was also seeing hundreds of gifsets and pics and meta and vids crossing my dashboard.
So my source seems to be…mostly myself. Seeking out what I'll respond to, delving into research for whatever new thing I'm working on. Talking about it often with friends helps, and I have a BFF who has a deep, deep knowledge of military stuff and WWII stuff that I can poke around in and talk about with. Inspiration can come from the strangest places sometimes--when I was working on Things We Lost in the War, I was copyediting a guidebook about living abroad in France. I was reading about the Masif Central and the hundreds of hot springs there, and I realized I had the fix for a segement of the story that had been bothering me for months. I just couldn't find a way to make it work to my satisfaction, even with all the WWII material I was sifting through, and then that little hot springs note made me remember some other stuff about the area I'd read in a book about the war, and just--pow! Fixed the whole section.
(And speaking of min, she also posted a list of reseources about mental health in WWII, and perusing that back in 2014 helped Dark Approach, because buried in some of that I found a treatment discussion for combat fatigue, which led to a whole other thing, and so on down the line, and helped me with the final chapter of the story.)
There's just always little fragments of information that I love to latch on to, whether it's from online resources or something that floats by in tumblr or something someone says to me.
ETA: Ooo! I did think of one resource that can be helpful for people writing historical fic: The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. There are a lot of extremely popular stories in Cap fandom that just kind of enrage me because they're so full of anachronistic phrasing that it ruins anything they write for me. You can often find out the date of origin for a word or phrase in a decent dictionary or even just a quick google search, but I've also come to love my AH idiom dictionary to double check on certain oddball English idiomatic phrases. They don't have a lot of sweary ones and some things are missing that I wish they'd address, but god, every time I see a historically set story where someone's saying "freaking out" or "gross" or something, I want to beat them over the head with this book. We have this tendency to take for granted that words always meant what they mean now, as if English isn't this constantly evolving language, and especially pop culture phrases, I wish writers would check more. Even if you can't check out an idiom dictionary from the library, there are people out there who can find out for you pretty quickly.
In your own space, post a rec for fannish and/or creative resources and spaces. Tell us where you go to dig up canon facts for your fandom, or where you get all the juicy details about your favorite ship. Where do you like to hang out and squee like a squeeing thing? Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
So,
minim_calibre posted some great resources here and I'm just gonna say you should go look at hers. killabeez also has posted some great resources.But me? I don't have a lot of things that I can rec people, because my research is often so idiosyncratic and centered around what I want to write that I can't imagine it being of use to anyone. For instance, I wanted to fill the prompt in the kissing meme for Steve/Bucky, baseball, which led me to look up casual baseball leagues in the '30s in NYC, and uniforms, and then that started me down a road toward which year the Dodgers might be playing a double-header on Steve's birthday, which led me to Bucky Walters, the famous pitcher back then, and television (finding out the first televised baseball game ever was the date when Bucky Walters pitched against the Dodgers in Brooklyn), which led me to an idea for baseball being played by soldiers in WWII so I started researching the where, when, and how of it. I can't imagine anyone else caring about that sort of research, so...
And I don't belong to any prompt communities or things that are designed to inspire writers, though sometimes I wish I could be. I tend to avoid those, because I know a lot of people who like sex kink and rape stories post there, and I really fucking hate seeing that stuff show up in front of my eyes because then I'm stuck with their summaries in my head for days and it's very upsetting. I loved the kissing fest that such heights put on last February, because the prompts were so interesting and fun. But I tend to stick with my little corner.
I will say that, much as I hate Tumblr as a tool because I think it's the most poorly designed website ever and it just keeps getting worse and worse to use, I've gotten a lot of fic ideas out of it. Meta and art and photography have sometimes been inspirational; and there's the squee factor, writ large. I know it was a huge portion of what made the summer of 2014 so spectacular for me, because at the time I was watching the movie every week in the theatre I was also seeing hundreds of gifsets and pics and meta and vids crossing my dashboard.
So my source seems to be…mostly myself. Seeking out what I'll respond to, delving into research for whatever new thing I'm working on. Talking about it often with friends helps, and I have a BFF who has a deep, deep knowledge of military stuff and WWII stuff that I can poke around in and talk about with. Inspiration can come from the strangest places sometimes--when I was working on Things We Lost in the War, I was copyediting a guidebook about living abroad in France. I was reading about the Masif Central and the hundreds of hot springs there, and I realized I had the fix for a segement of the story that had been bothering me for months. I just couldn't find a way to make it work to my satisfaction, even with all the WWII material I was sifting through, and then that little hot springs note made me remember some other stuff about the area I'd read in a book about the war, and just--pow! Fixed the whole section.
(And speaking of min, she also posted a list of reseources about mental health in WWII, and perusing that back in 2014 helped Dark Approach, because buried in some of that I found a treatment discussion for combat fatigue, which led to a whole other thing, and so on down the line, and helped me with the final chapter of the story.)
There's just always little fragments of information that I love to latch on to, whether it's from online resources or something that floats by in tumblr or something someone says to me.
ETA: Ooo! I did think of one resource that can be helpful for people writing historical fic: The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. There are a lot of extremely popular stories in Cap fandom that just kind of enrage me because they're so full of anachronistic phrasing that it ruins anything they write for me. You can often find out the date of origin for a word or phrase in a decent dictionary or even just a quick google search, but I've also come to love my AH idiom dictionary to double check on certain oddball English idiomatic phrases. They don't have a lot of sweary ones and some things are missing that I wish they'd address, but god, every time I see a historically set story where someone's saying "freaking out" or "gross" or something, I want to beat them over the head with this book. We have this tendency to take for granted that words always meant what they mean now, as if English isn't this constantly evolving language, and especially pop culture phrases, I wish writers would check more. Even if you can't check out an idiom dictionary from the library, there are people out there who can find out for you pretty quickly.
