Once upon a time, long ago, when Peter and I were courting, the US bombed Libya. As a result, US air travel to Europe fell off big time. British Airways' response to this was to give one June day's worth of its US-departing transatlantic seats away, by way of a raffle (they called the campaign "Go For It, America!"). You cut out the coupon in the paper, filled in your personal info, sent it off to BA, and waited. And astonishingly (because I had never before won anything in my life) I won a round-trip ticket on the second draw.
Before this happened, though, I'd said to myself, "And in case I don't win..." -- and ticketed myself on another BA flight in July of the same year. (This was in the days when I would still fly BA, though. Not any more. Staff attitudes toward their passengers have changed greatly since then: you get tired of the cattle prods after a while.)
Well, the prize tickets came through, and I got on the plane, very happy to be seeing Peter a little sooner than originally planned. One of the things that happened on the flight was that the airline was running a quiz. They would pass out little cards to the passengers: the cards had multiple-choice general knowledge questions on them, and a final "tie-breaker" question. You would fill in the card and hand it back in, and the staff would tote up the results. And the winner on that flight got a prize -- say, a week in a luxury condo in London. The winners' cards, though, from all the flights for that week, would then go into a big draw -- and the prize would be the condo itself.
Well, I found this pretty attractive at the time. Now, on that first flight, when I looked at the card they gave me, I knew I wasn't going to win the quiz that day. But I looked at the questions and recognized a pattern. The questions were exactly the kind you would derive from data in an Information Please Almanac. There was some math involved, too, but all the same, I looked at that card and thought: "If you got on the plane with an IP Almanac and a calculator, you could ace this sucker."
So I went to London, and Belfast, and saw Peter, and then came home again. And when I boarded the later flight which I had ticketed myself, I was carrying an Information Please Almanac and a calculator. And what the heck? I aced that sucker. The prize was a Stg 500 shopping spree at Harrods. (Unfortunately I did not go on to win the big prize, which was a Stg 10,000 shopping spree...but at the time I could have cared less: I was with Peter.) P. and I met in London, shopped like crazy, used the change from the shopping to have more fun still (the 500 pounds were paid to us as Harrods "scrip", and every time you bought something with it, you got normal money back), and generally enjoyed ourselves like mad.
A happy memory. (I still have the beautiful dyed calf and suede-lined briefcase I bought myself -- my first briefcase ever -- now much beat up, but still dearly loved). However, it now becomes apparent that I will not be boarding an aircraft with an almanac any time soon. If indeed ever.
(sigh) Sometimes I really dislike the way the world changes...
...A long hiatus between that last post and this one. I've been nose-deep in Wizards at War, while also running over to Geneva to take care of some business (and catching the "Escalade" as well, an unplanned, loud, and very pleasant dividend). Now we're in the middle of the pre-holiday craziness (or not-pre. Happy Hanukkah, guys!) and printing out cards like crazy.
While idling by the printer to make sure it's working all right, I stopped into FandomWank as I sometimes do, and ran across this and its numerous sequelae, starting out with someone's passionate condemnation of fanfic as a whole as morally reprehensible.
Fanfic's been on my mind lately. I reproduce here my response to some of the responses to the original post, for those of you who don't have time to go over there and rummage...
*****
(chuckle) Trying to define fanfic can make your eyes cross.
I've written a fair amount of stuff in other people's universes, but always by invitation (i.e. "Write this book/story/screenplay and we'll give you money.") It's exhilarating to play in other people's worlds -- and, peculiarly, to me it seems less like Work. Creating your own worlds is tough business: when you do it every day, cutting the occasional "class" to go play on the Enterprise or hang out with the Green Lantern Corps is really attractive.
I did write quite a lot of terrible Trek fanfic before I even knew there was such a thing -- and therefore have to ask: so does it count? If a fan ships in the forest and there's no one to hear...?? ...But that was all burned long ago. I then started to write Tolkien-ish fanfic that turned into something different (the earliest drafts of The Door into Fire and its sequels.) Yet I've only *purposely* written fanfic (i.e. intended for consumption in a fanfic-ish venue, i.e. a fanzine) twice: one Star Wars novella for the fanzine Sentinel, and a small group of Dr. Who stories (The Doctor makes pizza, etc...) which were done initially on CompuServe for my own amusement, and then donated to anthologies for charity. So no money changed hands...but both times, it was after I started selling professionally: a book of my own per year, and sometimes more. ...You'll see, then, why for my own part the definition of fanfic becomes a clouded thing and something I shy away from defining except in terms of "I did it as a fan, not as a pro: no money changed hands." (And once upon a time, in the ancient day, that was the generally understood definition.)
Before someone asks: how do I feel about other people writing fanfic in my worlds? Hmm.
Used to be I didn't care for it. Some aspects of it still make me twitch, slash in particular. (And I go back far enough to remember a time when "slash" meant only one thing: K/S. Boy, have I now dated myself: were dinosaurs ever walking the earth then.) And of course it depends on which characters are involved. Writing Herewiss/Freelorn slash seems like a waste of time. We *know* they do it...though I prefer that the lights be turned off, as it were, when I venture into their bedroom. ...And so on. But then...Kit and Nita? When I have my own plans for how things are going to turn out, and the characterizations of both seem to me to have made it plain that they're not going to be "going there" just yet? Hmm.
Yet you can't stop people thinking about it...or writing about it. Truthfully, it's kind of like going into a Manhattan kitchen where there is as yet no gecko living under the fridge. You turn the lights on, and Things scurry away under the cupboards and into every crevice. You can try to stomp on all the ones you see. But they're fast, and clever at hiding. Then you turn the light off and go away, and out they come again and get back to doing what they were doing before you turned on the lights. They don't care that you pay the rent on the kitchen. They're there to party. Only dragging in the exterminators will stop them. But (chopping the metaphor off) do I really want to do that? Is it, perhaps, something of an overreaction?...
The nature of present reality would seem to indicate that there's some other, more affable, more enjoyable, possibly more mature way to deal with the situation. I'm considering one or two. We'll see how it all works out. ..
Of course snow causes all kinds of trouble...but I wish I were in New York right now. Or rather, that I was there as the heavy stuff started to fall, and the city went silent. It's one of the few times you get to hear NY that way (or not hear it).
Peter and I were incredibly lucky a few years ago to be there for one of those magic nights/mornings. We had flown in just before Thanksgiving, and the night we arrived, the snow began. We had crashed for a little while after arriving, jet lag being what it is... but we woke up about two in the morning to find that about two inches of snow had already fallen, and it was coming down harder every moment. We got ourselves sorted out and spent the whole rest of the night walking the streets, enjoying it...stopping into this or that all-night place for a Little Something every now and then (Big Nick's at Broadway and 77th being one of the best of these. Okay, so it's not strictly an all-night place...they close for an hour, I think between 3 and 4 AM. Big deal). Shortly after dawn we were in Central Park playing in the snow with everybody's dogs, making snow angels and otherwise acting like eight-year-olds.
Heaven. I was so glad P. had had a chance to see the city that way, the streets empty or nearly so -- the only sound being the occasional jing-jing-jing of the chains on a snowplow as it passed. And the next morning, of course, people cross-country skiing up Fifth Avenue...
We have had the occasional blizzard here, but not nearly enough of them for my taste. During the last one we were distracted from taking endless pictures of it because we were about to head off to Switzerland on business: the thought that snow at home might prevent us from getting to Zurich was a little too much irony for me to appreciate. However, it all sorted itself out -- we dug a hole through the four-foot drift that had piled itself across the road in front of the house, and the taxi got to us eventually. And in Zurich (where it was raining) they listened to the story in disbelief. "Snow? In Ireland? It snows in Ireland? We thought it was always green there..."
Yeah, well. Let's see what it does today. It's cold enough, and the clouds have that threatening, slightly torn-up-at-the-edges look.... Maybe. Maybe.
Food Question #2: What happened to the Camembert?...
"Camembert is a lot more like the McMerde burger than you might suppose. Pierre Boisard seeks to show how, over the past 150 years or so, the cheese has been ruined: industrialised, homogenised, delocalised and, finally, pasteurised - and all without the assistance of American multinational corporations. It's almost wholly an indigenous French story..."
Dairy products in general and cheese in particular are something of a passion around here -- see the Home Dairying page at Edibilia for the recipes for homemade Monterey Jack, cottage cheese, sour cream, clotted cream and other such stuff -- so this article made a fascinating read. ...Well, for me, anyway. And now I'm wondering if there's any Boursin in the fridge...
A Wind from the South