What does it say that I spend so much time on my author’s notes for this piece? Meta, invisible fiction, creating the environment of a genre whole out of cloth and the culture that reads and writes it, metas it and reviews it, in the same way that I came out of fandom, people, and it’s something I can’t get away from and am slowly coming to the point where I can say I’ve stopped trying. I read, I write, I fangirl, and it gives me a very different view of how to engage with or engage in or speculate about literary culture.
I’m starting to really find myself examining this issue of literary culture in a way I sort of ignored before as unimportant in the same way I found engaging with the issue of race was unimportant for me though I am, in fact, multiracial with a unique culture that has come from the precise and rich melting pot of my family and family life. These things are easy to ignore because they hide around the edges.
But the more I write, the more I want to open these things up, the more I want to play with that literary culture and that social mesh and how that works for my characters and how it informs them and the themes I was already digging into with their lives. It interests me, though it was only a surface interest before. It interests me very much.
I got hooked on Save the Last Dance 2 last night, and this is what I bumped into, this concept of the cultural history of hip-hop music and dance and then of ballet and these words: I am here. It’s a genre making a statement that resonates and matters, that comes out even from the mouths and moves of the ignorant. It means something.
I’m still not that interested in engaging with my “own” genre: I write SFF for one reason only, it allows me to do anything I want to. Plus, less research. History and travel have never been my thing. I am interested, however, in culture and engaging with that in my SFF. This genre I love has a long history of doing just that, so I don’t feel all that out of touch by not caring even a lick about what others have been saying in genre. I talk to literature, but mostly classics and poetry. More than that, I talk to ideas and movements and religious questions and my own questions about identity and culture and family and relationships, etc.
Speaking of time, that was 258 words of author’s notes. :headdesk: I’ve got serious writer’s block just now, so I hoped that would loosen something up. Yeah. It didn't.
I'm not counting any fiction words since I deleted them all.
Word Counts:
- Fiction: 0 words
- Poetry: 0 lines | 0 words
- Blog: 568 words
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