From Maine to Japan

Congratulations on starting your new blog, Jen!

It's kind of neat, isn't it, to start something fresh. It's like when you open a fresh new paper journal, with all the reams of blank, clean paper, and your pen poised over it ready to pour all of your hopes, dreams, and thoughts into the pages. (hmm. I think I might be missing me my old book journals ...)

I don't know what 'protest' music is! As in protestors singing at rallies against and for issues, do you mean?

So, my friend, good luck with your new blog here!

Kal :-)
 

Awesome! Congratulations on your blog, Jen! I am happy of being able to stalk you here :) I didn't know google has bought Blogger! Haha, all good, since I have forgotten what my account in blogger is... babbling from days long past, mostly moping, I'm sure!

Ani DiFranco also does protest music, doesn't she? Her voice is oddly suited for that too, very... uh, I don't know the word. Two things you wouldn't think go together, and yet do! I really like last.fm, even if the darn scrobbler is messing with the new firefox... grr...
 

Hi Kal and Mina! It is indeed kind of fun to start something new, although I don't think there'll be a whole lot here. It's, you know, a halfway house between Livejournal and the real world, lol. And yep, Kal, protest music is mostly rally and civil rights music. Bruce and Ani! I'm listening to angry political music in my spare time, lol...

Man, I hate the non-threaded comments in Blogger. I don't even know if you guys will ever read this! I feel like I'm just kind of hollering into a vacuum...
 

Hi, Jen!!!

I'm so happy to see you here!

Gee, I know protest music (grew up in the Sixties), but I don't know what threaded or nonthreaded comments are...

It is a pain to have to check back, but people can choose "e-mail follow up comments" here.

I've been thinking I should look into other blogging options, like wordpress.
When I started blogging about 5 years ago (on a blog I have since deleted), there weren't all these free options, or I didn't know of them.

I don't know, though, I'm so comfie on Blogger, now that I'm letting myself be uncomfortable in iMovies, I think I'll just stick with the familiar. How much shaking up can my system take?

Anyway, Bruce Springsteen is the other life-force that I credit with keeping me sane (halfway) in the hideousness of high school--the other being, of course, Star Trek.
"Born to Run" came out in 1975, when I was 14--could you ask for better timing?
I saw him perform in 1978--one of the best moments of my life.
 

Hi Fresca! Threaded comments are when...uh, the response to a comment is linked to the comment it's responding to, creating a sort of step progression of comments. It makes it aq lot easier to have conversations develop...but with the track feature you can get around it. :)

It took me a while to learn to like Springsteen, simply because I was used to him being interpreted non-ironically by the folks I was growing up with. I can't remember exactly when I truly listened to "Born in the U.S.A.," but I remember it was like a light going off. :)

Star Trek largely got me through high school as well. I found a bunch of the pro novels in my local library and read them over and over and over. "The Entropy Effect" and "The Killing Time," I think I must have read them until they almost disintegrated...
 

Oooooh, I loved both those ST novels, particularly "Killing Time".

And yes, Jen, btw, to answer your other query, I CAN get your responses through e-mail to comments! (it's just like LJ, I suppose, that way! Which, speaking of, I hope is back up and running soon!)

I just saw on MuchMusic that Bruce Springsteen is in the top 10 for "The Studliest Rockers Over 40", LOL. Guess he still has it, in more than one way!

:-)
 

I just put "The Entropy Effect" on hold at the library, but who is the author of "The Killing Time"? I couldn't find it.
I read the James Blish novelizations of ST in high school.
How I would have loved the Web back then, and fanfic and all, even if it was appallingly written!
Kids these days. Don't know how lucky....
yadda yadda yadda
We had to walk 10 miles barefoot in the snow to see Star Trek!
 

"Killing Time" is by Della van Hise--a Romulan experiment alters the timestream of the universe and everyone wakes up to find that they are (and have always been) in a world where Kirk is a rebellious, sullen Ensign under the leadership of Captain Spock. Both it and "Entropy Effect" are basically slash...which I didn't realize at the time but I knew I loved them. "Star Trek: The New Voyages" is another one, an edited volume of what would now be recognized as fanfiction, pure and simple. The story "Mindsifter," in which Kirk's mind is broken and he flees through the Guardian of Forever and Spock becomes Captain and spends something like five years searching for him...well, I remember pressing the story into my father's hands, almost shaking with how much I wanted someone else to understand why this story was so awesome (in retrospect, I rather hope he didn't, lol).

They're not great writing by any stretch of the imagination, lol, but at the time they were like...a window I could sneak out of life through.
 

Goodness, how I loved "Mindsifter" too! I had such a dog-eared copy of that first "Voyages" anthology as a teen! There were a couple of other stories in that book that were pretty darned slashy too, as I recall. (and although I too didn't know what 'slash' ostensibly was, exactly, until I was an adult, I know exactly what you mean, Jen! (and any of the four novels by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath were pretty much blatant slash too.) Powerful (if somewhat purple) stuff!!!

Yes, you said it, Fresca - the 'youth' of today have it so lucky with the 'Net and reams of free fanfic available to them!! (gosh, I remember haunting old Sci-fi conventions and digging through piles of old magazines and fanzines, looking for fanfiction! You could order it through the mail sometimes too, though living in Canada I never could do so back then.)

Boy, this convo is starting to make feel a bit on the long-toothed side here ... LOL.

K. :-)
 

Did I say on my blog I don't want to read fiction these days?

I blush.

I stayed up till 1:30 A.M. last night reading Vondra McIntyre's novelization of Star Trek II, III & IV (well, I didn't finish it), which I found at the library when I was checking for her "Entropy Effect."

And I am going to request ALL these books you and Kalelin suggest!
In fact, they ring a distant bell--I did read published stories in the 1970s, and once in a while came across some mimeographed type zines (yeah, Kalelin, in a grungy sci-fi shop! come to think of it), which were like gold to me.

I don't know why I didn't mine that vein (zines) further, even if it was hard to find in those days.
I guess cause I went off to college and all and got interested in other things. Not to mention limited resources. I didn't even have a credit card of course!

But I swear I've never loved anything more than I loved ST in high school, and it's sort of weird to find I STILL love it just about as much, though for different reasons.

Jen--that story about pressing the story into your dad's hand reminds me of me begging my father just to listen once to Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run," which is sort of a rock-and-roll "To Boldly Go"! (As you say, windows to sneak out of.)
He sat through about half of it and then started to talk about other things.

(We still aren't close, though to give him credit, he did buy me a kit model of the Enterprise for Christmas, when I was 15! I wish I still had it, even though I put it together all jollywhompered.)

So, maybe I should try some online fanfic, after all, and just brave the tides of bad stuff, since at least I can trust it's written by people as demented as I am. : )
 

P.S. And I mean I begged my dad just to listen to the one song, not the whole album.
Oh well, it is a long song...

[Gee it's great to be grown-up. Worst curse: to go back to high school days. For me anyway.]
 

LOL Fresca, I cannot understand people who want to go back to high school. It's like--are you kidding me? I have very strong memories of a couple of moments when I was that age and I suddenly realized, with a sort of transcendent joy and certainty, that this would end. Most of the time it just didn't seem possible.

I'm honestly wondering if fanfiction might not be in a different category than fiction, in some ways. It's the characters, I think--if you love them and care about them, you're a lot more able to overlook poor writing. Or maybe it's more that as long as the writing is relatively "transparent" (competent enough to not distract, which not all fanfic is, of course), you can see through it to what you love in the fandom and the characters.
 

You're right--it is its own kind of writing! In fact, it barely has to be written, in the way of other literature, it can just tap into shared code--
have you seen this "Big List of K/S Cliches":

http://www.invisibleplanets.com/kirk_spock/KSCliches.htm

This made me laugh, but I also felt as if I had read a story--or 100.
My sister, who isn't a big fan, read the list and didn't get it, so i spent a very fun 5 minutes spinning a story out of the pieces for her:
"See, Spock and Kirk are in a shuttle going to a planet and it carshes..."
Oh--you know! All you have to do is fill in the blanks.
But the thing is, it's very very satisfying--I think because it *includes* the reader/author?

It reminds me very much of being part of the Catholic Church, where everyone knows the base stories intimately, so you don't have to go into detail when you talk/write about them or riff on them. I mean, thousands of years of art is built on them.

Have you written more about all this somewhere, Jen? (Academic papers?)
I'd love to read more of your thoughts on it...
 

P.S. Maybe I should just give you my e-mail, if you should ever want to write more about this off-blog
(**purely optional**!!! I'm sure you're busier than I am--I'm only working part-time).
But, just in case:
frescadp at yahoo dot com.