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mandolinSo I'm back, I survived, and despite Route 1 traffic and last-minute planning (and a wig that decided to vanish Thursday night), I made it up to visit Gamine and Rach, who was visiting the States for two weeks, and lunatic that I am, I accepted a last-minute invite to go up there for Halloween and actually MEET them in real life. Much fun, some great costumes (I will send you the photos, I promise!), and it was great to meet people who I'd only previously talked to on IM and e-mail and left rambling reviews for. And I even made it down to visit my folks and spend the evening hanging out with Death. So, a full weekend so far.
I've discovered just why I haven't been doling out my usual rambling reviews to the good fanfic I've been reading... but I'll get to that.
And yet, I'm in a funk. It took me a second to figure out why:
1) I'm running sound for the local production of Wait Until Dark, because I missed doing theater stuff. This week is tech week, and the play opens Friday (and I'll be there from noon - "whenever" tomorrow). Saturday evening is booked, and there's a Sunday matinee.
So I found out that a friend of mine who I haven't seen since the beginning of August is coming up this coming weekend. She wants us all to get together Sunday to see a matinee of the third Matrix flick. I would love to go along. I am hoping and praying there's going to be a 4:30 showing, because I'm going to have to get out of the church like a bat out of hell Sunday to make the rendevous.
It's this and other things that make me wonder why I decided to run sound for the play in the first place. I missed theater - but I miss my friends. I swear I haven't seen the rest of the SisterHood half as much as I used to. And now Plague is coming up and I've got this play and I won't be able to spend any real time with War, Plague, Death, and Pestilence all at once. Yes, I know you all say it'll be fine and you'll wait and not to panic... but it's not an issue of panicking so much as it is an issue of me being really annoyed with myself. I don't like being the one who drags things down and holds things up, and lately I've been that person way too often for my tastes.
2) So a while back I kicked off a fanfic feedback experiment to give authors diplomatic reviews - reviews that were honest and could not be construed as flames (read: snark-free). Up until now, the results were actually promising. But then I made the mistake of looking at a Spuffy fic that used rape as an excuse to get Spike and Buffy together (Riley rapes Buffy, Spike saves her, they cuddle and confront Riley the next day). Now I made two mistakes: first, I misread an erotic dream sequence as the real thing (the POV switches made it confusing), and second, I let some emotion into the review.
First mistake was corrected before I read the author's note where she screamed at me ("WHERE THE HELL IN MY STORY DOES IT SAY THEY HAVE SEX?"), but she stood by her claim that different people would react differently to rape and that Buffy might want Spike to come help her shower since she was in shock (since he was fully clothed and didn't take advantage of her) and then have an erotic dream about him that same night. And since she put up a rape warning I shouldn't have read it since the content would have offended me. (But there are fics where the author actually does their homework about the aftereffects of rape. I submit Kelsey's Touch as an example of this. The warning did not mention how the content would be treated.)
And then of course she got a slew of pity reviews. With the ever-illogical retort "If you don't like it, then don't read it," of course, that lumped every negative review into the category of a flame. They called it a "sweet story" and cheered the Riley-bashing (which really was the least of my issues with it). Gah.
I just realized the reason I haven't been reviewing some of these great stories is that I've been spending time reviewing stuff that needs work. Now a lot of the authors I reviewed were really nice about it and took my comments to heart, but a small minority like this person are just a waste of that time.
I need a break from reviewing in general. I'm putting the fanfic feedback experiment away. Maybe it's just me, but it's harder to generate long long reviews about fics you liked as opposed to fics you had issues with.
Oh, look. It's 1:30. I need to get my sorry behind in bed ASAP.
(Director notwithstanding, I am leaving the church before 9 pm tomorrow; I have work on Monday, and they do not need the person running sound quite that late...)
I've discovered just why I haven't been doling out my usual rambling reviews to the good fanfic I've been reading... but I'll get to that.
And yet, I'm in a funk. It took me a second to figure out why:
1) I'm running sound for the local production of Wait Until Dark, because I missed doing theater stuff. This week is tech week, and the play opens Friday (and I'll be there from noon - "whenever" tomorrow). Saturday evening is booked, and there's a Sunday matinee.
So I found out that a friend of mine who I haven't seen since the beginning of August is coming up this coming weekend. She wants us all to get together Sunday to see a matinee of the third Matrix flick. I would love to go along. I am hoping and praying there's going to be a 4:30 showing, because I'm going to have to get out of the church like a bat out of hell Sunday to make the rendevous.
It's this and other things that make me wonder why I decided to run sound for the play in the first place. I missed theater - but I miss my friends. I swear I haven't seen the rest of the SisterHood half as much as I used to. And now Plague is coming up and I've got this play and I won't be able to spend any real time with War, Plague, Death, and Pestilence all at once. Yes, I know you all say it'll be fine and you'll wait and not to panic... but it's not an issue of panicking so much as it is an issue of me being really annoyed with myself. I don't like being the one who drags things down and holds things up, and lately I've been that person way too often for my tastes.
2) So a while back I kicked off a fanfic feedback experiment to give authors diplomatic reviews - reviews that were honest and could not be construed as flames (read: snark-free). Up until now, the results were actually promising. But then I made the mistake of looking at a Spuffy fic that used rape as an excuse to get Spike and Buffy together (Riley rapes Buffy, Spike saves her, they cuddle and confront Riley the next day). Now I made two mistakes: first, I misread an erotic dream sequence as the real thing (the POV switches made it confusing), and second, I let some emotion into the review.
First mistake was corrected before I read the author's note where she screamed at me ("WHERE THE HELL IN MY STORY DOES IT SAY THEY HAVE SEX?"), but she stood by her claim that different people would react differently to rape and that Buffy might want Spike to come help her shower since she was in shock (since he was fully clothed and didn't take advantage of her) and then have an erotic dream about him that same night. And since she put up a rape warning I shouldn't have read it since the content would have offended me. (But there are fics where the author actually does their homework about the aftereffects of rape. I submit Kelsey's Touch as an example of this. The warning did not mention how the content would be treated.)
And then of course she got a slew of pity reviews. With the ever-illogical retort "If you don't like it, then don't read it," of course, that lumped every negative review into the category of a flame. They called it a "sweet story" and cheered the Riley-bashing (which really was the least of my issues with it). Gah.
I just realized the reason I haven't been reviewing some of these great stories is that I've been spending time reviewing stuff that needs work. Now a lot of the authors I reviewed were really nice about it and took my comments to heart, but a small minority like this person are just a waste of that time.
I need a break from reviewing in general. I'm putting the fanfic feedback experiment away. Maybe it's just me, but it's harder to generate long long reviews about fics you liked as opposed to fics you had issues with.
Oh, look. It's 1:30. I need to get my sorry behind in bed ASAP.
(Director notwithstanding, I am leaving the church before 9 pm tomorrow; I have work on Monday, and they do not need the person running sound quite that late...)
