![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Oct. 14th, 2015 07:25 pmOk, first, I'm going to try to sell you Carry On.
Carry On is the latest book my Rainbow Rowell. Who is a beautiful individual. She wrote Fangirl which you might have come across about a year ago which was a great portrayal of fandom and how fandom isn't a force for bad in the world. Carry On is the most meta of all meta, it's basically the fic the fictional character in the book wrote, which was based on Harry/Draco fic. So in a lot of ways Carry On is a love song to Harry/Draco but if you don't ship that, it's still good. It's a love song to Harry Potter in general and it's a love song to all of Fandom.
I don't want to spoil it too much but Rowell writes romance so I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you there's a romance element. And it's executed beautifully. You won't know if you're reading original work or the best kind of fanfiction and you won't care. The romance is adorable, the characters are great. The sidekick character is a south-Asian girl who's a bit pudgy but kicks all of the ass in the world. This book basically addresses more or less every criticism that fandom has collectively leveled at Harry Potter over the years.
And the writing is Rowell so it's beautiful. She has real emotional punch and lush descriptions that somehow feel true and sometimes it's more like poetry than prose and basically I want to marry her. Her writing is so good.
So, go read it. Then come fangirl with me becasue I have a need.
Now meme.
5 –If you have ever had a character try to push their way into a fic, whether your "muse" or not, what did you do about it?
I'm half-assing this one as the short answer is no.
6 – When you write, do you prefer writing male or female characters?
...In my original writing I tend to write female, in my fanfiction I tend to write male. Though it's debatable how true to the way masculinity is performed in society my men come. It's my personal belief that when a lot of us write men in slash pairings what we're really doing is exploring what it's like to live in an equal world as it's almost impossible to write male/female romance without politics coming into it somewhere. And we know that because we live it. But when we write slash, we don't have to worry about that. We can conveniently forget that bit for a while and forget that sometimes being a woman in society sucks and, yeah, this is hugely problematic because among other things it accepts (normally) white man as some kind of default the rest of us can explore humanity through but it's also freeing in that we can tell the kind of romance and erotic stories we want and also in that we can redefine masculinity in our own way.
( Rest of the questions under the cut )
Carry On is the latest book my Rainbow Rowell. Who is a beautiful individual. She wrote Fangirl which you might have come across about a year ago which was a great portrayal of fandom and how fandom isn't a force for bad in the world. Carry On is the most meta of all meta, it's basically the fic the fictional character in the book wrote, which was based on Harry/Draco fic. So in a lot of ways Carry On is a love song to Harry/Draco but if you don't ship that, it's still good. It's a love song to Harry Potter in general and it's a love song to all of Fandom.
I don't want to spoil it too much but Rowell writes romance so I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you there's a romance element. And it's executed beautifully. You won't know if you're reading original work or the best kind of fanfiction and you won't care. The romance is adorable, the characters are great. The sidekick character is a south-Asian girl who's a bit pudgy but kicks all of the ass in the world. This book basically addresses more or less every criticism that fandom has collectively leveled at Harry Potter over the years.
And the writing is Rowell so it's beautiful. She has real emotional punch and lush descriptions that somehow feel true and sometimes it's more like poetry than prose and basically I want to marry her. Her writing is so good.
So, go read it. Then come fangirl with me becasue I have a need.
Now meme.
5 –If you have ever had a character try to push their way into a fic, whether your "muse" or not, what did you do about it?
I'm half-assing this one as the short answer is no.
6 – When you write, do you prefer writing male or female characters?
...In my original writing I tend to write female, in my fanfiction I tend to write male. Though it's debatable how true to the way masculinity is performed in society my men come. It's my personal belief that when a lot of us write men in slash pairings what we're really doing is exploring what it's like to live in an equal world as it's almost impossible to write male/female romance without politics coming into it somewhere. And we know that because we live it. But when we write slash, we don't have to worry about that. We can conveniently forget that bit for a while and forget that sometimes being a woman in society sucks and, yeah, this is hugely problematic because among other things it accepts (normally) white man as some kind of default the rest of us can explore humanity through but it's also freeing in that we can tell the kind of romance and erotic stories we want and also in that we can redefine masculinity in our own way.
( Rest of the questions under the cut )