![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[sticky entry]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/entry/sticky_entry.png){kind=small}
The Canticle of Necessity
Sep. 9th, 2012 01:15 pmThis years Burning Man post, abandon hope of not being exposed to overwrought prose all ye who enter here.
( The Canticle of Necessity )
As I've just arrived back from Burning Man it seems like a suitable time to post my write up from last year again while I finish this years' photos and mini-lecture. Please note that as it was written for the church blog it contains extremely overwrought prose and some Christian Talk.
For the curious amongst you the title of this piece is taken from We Are Shangri-La on Quartered: Songs of Palimpsest because that book is the closest thing I've found which touches the feeling of living in and longing for Black Rock City. The poem the track is based on was originally written about BRC so it's nice to know I'm not alone in thinking that.
For the curious amongst you the title of this piece is taken from We Are Shangri-La on Quartered: Songs of Palimpsest because that book is the closest thing I've found which touches the feeling of living in and longing for Black Rock City. The poem the track is based on was originally written about BRC so it's nice to know I'm not alone in thinking that.
“We raise and raze our city like the strangest house of cards, a ghost-breath mist of snow;
A ghost-breath mist of snow where no snow falls,
For we are Atlantis, and the town of Prester John.
Three weeks apart from never, we dance and do not fall.”
- We Are Shangri-La, S. J. Tucker
( We love our city just to watch it burn )
Skyscraper skyline
Jul. 30th, 2012 08:21 pmSome of you may know in just a few days The City's Son by Tom Pollock is coming out, otherwise known as Your New Favourite Author. For those of you who love YA urban fantasy based in London (and I'm not sure how many of you don't, although I am supportive of all lifestyle choices obviously) I would strongly encourage you to pick it up.
The official synopsis is as follows:
"Hidden under the surface of everyday London is a city of monsters and miracles, where wild train spirits stampede over the tracks and glass-skinned dancers with glowing veins light the streets. When a devastating betrayal drives her from her home, graffiti artist Beth Bradley stumbles into the secret city, where she finds Filius Viae, London's ragged crown prince, just when he needs someone most. An ancient enemy has returned to the darkness under St Paul's Cathedral, bent on reigniting a centuries-old war, and Beth and Fil find themselves in a desperate race through a bizarre urban wonderland, searching for a way to save the city they both love. The City's Son is the first book of The Skyscraper Throne trilogy: a story about family, friends and monsters, and how you can't always tell which is which."
As I am aware that I can ramble on incoherently about this book for many paragraphs it's probably safest if I leave you this link to the first extract, one will be posted at a different location (included in the link) each day leading up to the 2nd. Trust me.
The official synopsis is as follows:
"Hidden under the surface of everyday London is a city of monsters and miracles, where wild train spirits stampede over the tracks and glass-skinned dancers with glowing veins light the streets. When a devastating betrayal drives her from her home, graffiti artist Beth Bradley stumbles into the secret city, where she finds Filius Viae, London's ragged crown prince, just when he needs someone most. An ancient enemy has returned to the darkness under St Paul's Cathedral, bent on reigniting a centuries-old war, and Beth and Fil find themselves in a desperate race through a bizarre urban wonderland, searching for a way to save the city they both love. The City's Son is the first book of The Skyscraper Throne trilogy: a story about family, friends and monsters, and how you can't always tell which is which."
As I am aware that I can ramble on incoherently about this book for many paragraphs it's probably safest if I leave you this link to the first extract, one will be posted at a different location (included in the link) each day leading up to the 2nd. Trust me.
Four years later
Nov. 6th, 2011 02:07 pmI've finally made my dissertation available online. It's four years after I promised I'd do anything with it but it's the thought that counts, right?
The Literary and Academic Claims of Fan Fiction and Fan Meta - The 2011 Remix
Introduction to an Introduction
The year was 2007, Snape had killed Dumbledore, LiveJournal was still cool, I was young, pretentious and in my final year of University. I was working on a dissertation, which I hoped would keep my interest (and have a reasonable amount of secondary source material) while being sufficiently obscure that my tutors wouldn’t mark it too harshly. It was handed in two months before the release of Deathly Hallows and driven in part by the feeling of pre-emptive nostalgia for the biggest fandom in existence at that time. All our years of theorising and fixation, late night conversations and midnight releases and threaded through all of this was the internet; the technology which made it possible for all of us to scream into the void about our loves and hatreds and longings and how adults just didn’t understand and have other people yell back. The first time I realised that I could go online and find people who cared about the things that I cared about whether that was painting my bedroom black (my parents were so cruel!) or Harry Potter.
And so my dissertation was written, or to be more precise, slowly dragged out of me over the course of a year while I complained frequently online about what I had and had not written. Some of this was typed up in a frenzy of desperation on my laptop during Whitby Gothic Weekend. My original outline for this piece would have split it in two, one focusing on Harry Potter fandom and another on fan fiction resulting from the movie adaptation of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and how that secondary interpretation of the text affected fan responses. Sadly by the time I’d written even half of this I realised that it wouldn’t match the original word count of 10,000.
I promised any number of people that once University was over I would put it online for posterity after I’d finished some secondary editing but Deathly Hallows came and went and then I had a full time job and what with one thing and other the years have slipped away. It wasn’t until DiaCon Alley this year that I seriously started thinking about reworking it, when I went back to the original version I was slightly embarrassed to see some of the rookie errors I had made despite receiving 2:1 so I suspect I just set higher standards for myself nowadays. This is not the University copy of my dissertation, this is the 2011 remix written with the benefit of hindsight, another book, access to secondary canon and another stack of late night conversations from some wonderful friends.
The 2011 remix is dedicated to Maddie Plum and Emily Duranorak who suffered through editing the first version and everyone who made DiaCon Alley possible and reminded me why we were so excited about all this in the first place.
The Literary and Academic Claims of Fan Fiction and Fan Meta - The 2011 Remix
The year was 2007, Snape had killed Dumbledore, LiveJournal was still cool, I was young, pretentious and in my final year of University. I was working on a dissertation, which I hoped would keep my interest (and have a reasonable amount of secondary source material) while being sufficiently obscure that my tutors wouldn’t mark it too harshly. It was handed in two months before the release of Deathly Hallows and driven in part by the feeling of pre-emptive nostalgia for the biggest fandom in existence at that time. All our years of theorising and fixation, late night conversations and midnight releases and threaded through all of this was the internet; the technology which made it possible for all of us to scream into the void about our loves and hatreds and longings and how adults just didn’t understand and have other people yell back. The first time I realised that I could go online and find people who cared about the things that I cared about whether that was painting my bedroom black (my parents were so cruel!) or Harry Potter.
And so my dissertation was written, or to be more precise, slowly dragged out of me over the course of a year while I complained frequently online about what I had and had not written. Some of this was typed up in a frenzy of desperation on my laptop during Whitby Gothic Weekend. My original outline for this piece would have split it in two, one focusing on Harry Potter fandom and another on fan fiction resulting from the movie adaptation of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and how that secondary interpretation of the text affected fan responses. Sadly by the time I’d written even half of this I realised that it wouldn’t match the original word count of 10,000.
I promised any number of people that once University was over I would put it online for posterity after I’d finished some secondary editing but Deathly Hallows came and went and then I had a full time job and what with one thing and other the years have slipped away. It wasn’t until DiaCon Alley this year that I seriously started thinking about reworking it, when I went back to the original version I was slightly embarrassed to see some of the rookie errors I had made despite receiving 2:1 so I suspect I just set higher standards for myself nowadays. This is not the University copy of my dissertation, this is the 2011 remix written with the benefit of hindsight, another book, access to secondary canon and another stack of late night conversations from some wonderful friends.
The 2011 remix is dedicated to Maddie Plum and Emily Duranorak who suffered through editing the first version and everyone who made DiaCon Alley possible and reminded me why we were so excited about all this in the first place.
Parlour Games
Sep. 26th, 2010 05:33 pmIt's been a while since I got this excited about any particular project of a friends so here we go.
I know that I tend to fall in love with any text that includes London as a character but Pass the Parcel is genuinely one of my favourite books of the last few years, the sort of writing and world building that actually upset me when considered against the fact that Stephanie Meyer was published and this wasn't. I was always a bit smug that having an ereader meant that I could carry the book around with me and read it anywhere I wanted and now you can all enjoy this feeling with an a physical copy of your very own!
The world is populated by everything from humans to Artificial Humans, but speciesism runs rampant. Everything that can go terribly wrong does; and while it always comes back to Brazil, it all seems to be going down in London, which is a seething pot of conflicts and crossed wires, as new lies are told and old ones resurface; as old murders are recalled and new ones committed; as history is rewritten; and as a very ugly but potentially extremely powerful statue is passed from wrong hand to wrong hand.
I love this damn book so much that I arranged for it's own website to make it easier for me to harass you about it.
The book. Purchase it. You'll thank me for this later.
I know that I tend to fall in love with any text that includes London as a character but Pass the Parcel is genuinely one of my favourite books of the last few years, the sort of writing and world building that actually upset me when considered against the fact that Stephanie Meyer was published and this wasn't. I was always a bit smug that having an ereader meant that I could carry the book around with me and read it anywhere I wanted and now you can all enjoy this feeling with an a physical copy of your very own!
I love this damn book so much that I arranged for it's own website to make it easier for me to harass you about it.
The book. Purchase it. You'll thank me for this later.
