This Creature is Lore

Soon I shall hopefully be remembering to make the 9pm toast to the Professor, on his birthday. This being so close to the new year, it seems a good occasion for reflection upon some fannish stuff.

- I have not been very good about supporting my fellow tertiary-world writers this past year. Some people probably know I had a sort of fannish meltdown closer to the start of 2014, right around the time I was also a B2MeM mod, didn't fulfill my B2MeM writing prompt and pulled only minimal moderatorly duties, etc. This general trend largely persisted throughout the year, due to a comination of RL and discovering what my limits are as far as attempting to participate in fandom outside of LJ and the SWG. It's too late to go back and amend that, but I hope to do a bit better in 2015.

- For almost as long as I can remember, I've had characters living in my head. Sometimes they have almost literally been all I had. They used to be my own characters invented from scratch. Since 2007, they've been my versions of Tolkien's (usually minor) characters. Though in a way these are still my own, my precious, and I'm sure I have used them in ways he would not always have condoned, I owe their existence to this now-deceased pipe-smoking philologist. Even though I haven't written much this year, they are always there, having adventures and mishaps I've yet to put down in words, grudingly channeling my interests and emotions in appropriate symbolic ways that help me to maintain my outward sanity, and sometimes offering instructive thoughts on how to better myself (or serving as unhappy exemplars of what not to do).

- I'm not precisely the hugest Jackson!film fan these days, but I have Peter Jackson's particular brand of fannishness and its results to even thank for the fact that I'm thanking the Professor now. I saw all three of the first trilogy in the theatres with an esrtwhile boyfriend. Thankfully, that philanderer is long gone from my life, but technically, the films are not, since they first prompted me to read the books (which I admittedly found to be very slow going the first time around). Due to Sir Lee's portrayal, the subtleties of which did not escape me, I was a Saruman sympathizer before I even read the books; to be perfectly frank, I'd found out about the character's pre-wizard history via the interwebs well before I even read up to the point where he actually appears in The Two Towers (I think I read TTT in 2005 or so). This probably explains, well, a lot, come to think of it.

I'm in a way better mood today.  I think it has more than a bit to do with the fact that I started my B2Me story last night.  Yes, singular, I'm just doing one story, which I anticipate might fall into the 10,000-20,000 word range if I do manage to finish what I start for once.  Among other things, I was feeling crappy that I wanted to start a new story when I have so many unfinished ones giving me the evil eye from out of their dusty corners.  But then I realized that I was enthusiastic about and inspired by my Númenor plot bunny, so why the crap not just do it?

It's going to have multiple POVs and probably various narrative styles, which ought to keep me entertained.  I started it last night with a bit from Aulë's POV.

I think Mairon will have something to say today.  Am debating doing first person Mairon, which I have never done and I don't know if it's a good idea because his personality is so drastically different from mine that I always feel like it would be invasive and insensitive of me to presume to get inside his head.  (I've never had a character who actually intimidates me before, to say nothing of intimidating all my typical POV characters.)

The challenge--well, this often is the challenge for me--will be not to get bogged down in geophysical considerations.  I should especially stay far, far away from researching whether there are any possible ways for a continental microplate to exist in the midst of a bunch of oceanic crust.  There are other ways to solve this without spending the better part of a day in research.