Andare, Partire, Tornare ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Insert clever title here Just found out that our museum prep guy has decided to go back to his old job at the Library of Congress. They can pay him better than we can, and truthfully, I've been wondering if he wasn't a little bored here because we didn't have things for him to do that he was particularly excited about. No sessions of making intricate mounts for objects, not a whole lot of building frames, yadda yadda. So we have to put the ol' ad out and start interviewing again. Maybe we'll have better luck this time around - it might have been a hint that we interviewed the current guy on Sept. 11th! Phew, that can't be great karma. Got the feedback on my HP fic back, and R.J.Anderson was both kind and incisive. I have perpetrated a Mary Sue - at least a main character with Mary Sue overtones. I didn't quite realize that the American exchange student trope had been so well mined by hack fic writers until most of the first twelve pages were written, and while my character slightly slips past that (in that it doesn't really make any difference to the story where she's from - she happens to be American because I didn't want to deal with all the britishisms that I could flub), it's probably enough to make people roll their eyes. The thing is, I'm writing this fic mostly for myself, and yet it doesn't make much sense to me to continue writing it and never show it to people (which would mean I could Mary-Sue the entire thing, and give my main character a cat named Gracie and a the fabulous talent for singing that I always wanted). But I don't want the story to languish on my harddrive with just my own two eyes reading it. Plus, the slews of generous praise from my Anita Blake fic felt soooo good to read. I suck at taking criticism, by the way. Both the literary kind and the general - I know I need it frequently, and I'm rarely shy about dishing it out, but it always takes some time for me to get past a slow burn in my stomach when I hear corrections to something of mine being offered until I can take the changes to heart. I not only get protective, which is understandable, but in a certain way I get ashamed - how could I have created/done/appeared as this flawed thing? I'm not sure what it is, because I certainly don't have a strong perfectionist streak. It might be the fact that I got a bunch of praise throughout high school for essentially coasting along but still doing better than a lot of students who were working their butts off. I started to feel entitled to being praised, and unused to recieving a critique. If I'm going to plunge into the Harry Potter world of fic, I'm going to have to learn how to take it, because those people are hardcore. They take no crap off of people who are just dabbling. Going to have to go make sure that the lady from South Carolina can put the gate to her room back on without extra assistance. Which means limping up two flights of stairs with a plantar wart on the sole of my foot that is starting to really ache. 11:28 a.m. - 2003-07-10 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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