(no subject)

Okay, after being annoyed that my computer blew up when I tried to download the Torchwood playlists on the BBCA site, I'm laughing my ass off as last.fm's "artists similar to Nick Cave" spews out Sisters of Mercy's Temple of Love while reading stuff from sam_storyteller. It's perfect, cheesetastic and awful (and also full of college nostalgia for me).

Works almost as well as reading Neuromancer while listening to U2's Atchung Baby! (try it, it's creepy!)

That is all.

LJ Idol -- why I voted as I did

Now that this has been posted, I can explain what my decision making process was.

I was the first Gatekeeper to get their vote in. That said, I did, in fact, read every entry twice. If when I went to read the entry a second time, I couldn't remember what it was about until I clicked on it, that was definitely a factor I considered in not voting for someone.

There was at least one entry that I would say was close to technically perfect that I didn't vote for because I couldn't connect to it, and that didn't seem to be an intentional choice. It had a "Reader's Digest" vibe and to me that's not what LJ was about. The "Reader's Digest" vibe was one of my recurrent peeves throughout the season, and I'm glad to see it almost gone, but there still seems to be this tendency of people choosing topics and tones based on what they think they should do, and it makes the writing stilted and a bit "What I Did on My Summer Vacation."

I did vote for several of the "tear jerkers," but I also didn't vote for several of the "tear jerkers." What made the difference? The pieces that weren't actually about "look at this awful thing that happened to me" and were actually about brushes with magic and the burdens of them. I'm not interested in the LJ misery sweepstakes, and was relieved to the degree to which I didn't feel like this game was being played.

Entries I both did and didn't vote for had some consistent problems that drove me insane:

- Credit is due to Jacqueline Carey for reminding me of this way of putting this problem: if you show me a gun in the first act, someone better fire it in the third. Several entries dropped bombs early on that turned out to be tangental to the pieces they were in. The bombs were more interesting than where the pieces ultimately went, and this lack of editorial vision drove me bugfuck. Sometimes, it just seemed sloppy.

- It was often unclear to me why someone was telling the story they were. I didn't know how it benefited me as the reader or them as the teller.

- The converse of the gun problem were people who padded their pieces with paragraphs of utter crap at the beginning that should have just been lopped off because the story clearly started later in the piece.

- Weak endings. Still.

- People who described very ordinary occurrences or personal traits as if these experiences made them a unique snowflake. How you react to the experience and how you tell the experience make you a unique snowflake, but not the experiences. I realize this may seem hypocritical to a lot of you, since so much of my writing is about making the ordinary seem magical, but my point is some people tried this and failed -- some more successfully than others.

- I realize "trigger warnings" are part of the culture of LJ, but they are part of the culture of LJ I find offensive. I didn't make any decisions based on this, but I'm just letting you know, that the second I see them, it's hard for me not to assume that whatever I am about to read is going to come from a place of unredeemed fear or victimization. This was actually not the case with the pieces in question, but that's what you have to overcome for me when you warn.

- While people remained in the competition who I've known online and off for a long time or had interpersonal drama with, that wasn't a factor. The one person I was concerned about my ability to be objective towards left the competition before this round, to my relief.

- There were two pieces I voted for that I actually hated, but each had a turn of phrase in them that was so unspeakably exquisite that they got my vote anyway.

- I will not tell you if I voted for you or not. If you want an actual critique of your piece, post here, and I will give it to you next week after my book is in.