Marta's Mathoms

I've been thinking about beta-reading as disability accommodation lately. Don't let the jargony words scare you off, please, because I think this should be important to all kinds of folks who craft fandom spaces. Plus it's interesting.

As a kid I was diagnosed with a variety of written-expression disorders, and as a teen with ADHD. Add to that a few psychological issues stemming from some prolonged and complicated grief that built up some truly unhelpful coping mechanisms over the last decade, not least of all most of the symptoms of clinical depression (can't be diagnosed as such, apparently, because it's based in experiences to which those symptoms are rational responses, but as my therapist points out, if it quacks like a duck....), and a self-esteem so microscopic they're still working on the instruments sensitive enough to detect it.

There's that dark sense of humor that's not all that helpful. ;-)

And really, I'm not aiming at sympathy here. I'm not 100% convinced those diagnoses are all on the money, though there's something mighty familiar in a lot of them. I also don't think I'm necessarily unique. In parts, but not at all; lots of people probably struggle with crippling lack of self-worth, sadness that makes it a bit hard to get up and go, or any one of a number of neuro/learning issues that makes it a mighty struggle to make the words go.

My point is, it's hard. Not impossibly hard, but hard in the way it might be for someone with fibromyalgia to walk across a parking lot. They can do it, maybe, once in a while, but boy will it take it out of them. Best to give them that handicap parking spot by the door. Or to take another example: how a shoe-horn might really make dressing yourself easier for people who struggle to bend over, not that they absolutely can't on their own but it just makes life a little less onerous and autonomy a little more practical. It's actually hard to the point that there's a higher "entry cost" to start writing (even when inspired and willing, it just seems to take such effort), and I'm both less able to detect certain writing errors than most people are (I'm infamous for using similar-sounding words and not being able to see the difference). That's the cognitive side. The psychological side makes it harder to bear up under the embarrassment or sense of failure of publicly posting a story full of that.

I'm sure this all takes a different form for different people, and is probably more or less imposing for some than others. But I think most people experience this to a degree, and for a lot of people (not all!) it's actually prohibitive. Or at least limiting. There's probably a spectrum of increasing difficulty and less likelihood they'll actually participate as a writer. And there's also probably unnecessary negative experiences that make it harder to want to create a second time, too. Again, at the risk of getting too personal, I'm dealing with a smidge of that at the moment; I've dealt with worse and the past and I know other people have dealt with worse still. And so even if you push through and write the once, doing that without the helpful support makes it hard to write again, too.

Which is a shame. Because, again speaking for myself, I'm good at writing! I love having-written, and I think other people like when I've written, too. And even if people can't make that statement about themselves for whatever reason, I think they're still missing out on positive things. The ability to get better, or to have their ideas and imaginings read, or the community or the ability to play with fiction and pop culture in the unique writerly way. There's reasons this is all so good.

I think in fandom we talk about betas as a gift to the reader, a way to make sure the stories are suitably polished and easy to read. But I think also they can be such a huge help for the writer, giving her the tools and confidence and cheerleading and whatever else she needs to actually do the thing. I wonder if it would be helpful to think of beta-reading and helping betas find authors (and vice versa) the same way we do as coding sites so they work well with screen readers for the visually impaired, or avoiding flashing graphics and certain color schemes out of deference to epileptics and folks with certain kinds of color blindness.

All of which makes me think this is a problem community-builders and site-designers should tackle systemically. Not that we need to guarantee a beta for everyone, but building the spaces to help people find each other effectively is on the same level as those other disability-friendly design elements.

Durned if I know how to do that in practice, though. Devil's in the details, as always.

I.

So a few weeks ago I read Good Omens for the first time. To be clear, this is entirely --and I do mean entirely-- vulgarweed's fault. It was my introduction to both Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (*thumbs nose @ inner geek), and I keep meaning to respond properly to it. Mostly I want to read it again, and I think I need to do that before I can properly wrap my head around it.

The one thing I am sure about is that there needs to be more fannish involvement with that book. On the off-chance you agree,  what serendipity! GO Holiday Exchange sign-ups are open. I'm not signing up myself beause I need another fandom like I need John Watson's magically migrating gunshot wound in my leg, but I'd love to read it. Go (or GO, as the case may be) and sign up. I'm sure V. would appreciate the show of support. Plus, you know, Gaiman/Pratchett fanworks. Do you really need more of an excuse?

II.

In other news, but every bit as much of a plug: one of my fave bloggers wrote a piece comparing fanfic to midrash. The gist is that we're not poachers or trespassers in another person's sandbox, we are instead valued interpreters that become part of the tradition. It's a really creative approach and one I want to reply to in more depth once I've had the time to think through it properly. GO does that on its own, re-purposing and working with Biblical elements and bringing in its own, but all fanfic really (or at least the best of fanfic, what I'm aiming for) seems to do that in one way or another. I suspect most literature does full-stop, since even original fic has to grow out of some soil or other.

Check it out: "Fan Fiction and Midrash: Making Meaning." You can also read her blog (which is about religion rather than fandom) here, if your'e so inclined.

III.

A few days ago I mentioned that HASA was closing down and I listed off a few of the people I most associated with that site. It was a quickly made list and I knew I'd leave a lot of people off. Basically if you know me from before I got involved in Sherlock, I almost certainly owe that site credit for making the introduction, and there's good odds we met in the trenches of volunteering with that particular site. Adding to the list is almost sure to make matters worse rather than better because there's so many, I'm sure to come up with an incomplete list. But some omissions are inexcusable:

celandineb, who was site manager for years before I took over briefly and, in one of the darkest periods of my life, took the reigns back up again when I had to step down.

dwimordene_2011, who took me under her wing when I was first getting involved as a volunteer and is in my humble opinion the best challenges manager I've come across in Tolkien fandom or out of it.

juno_magic, who not only worked tirelessly behind the scenes in many ways I'm sure I'm not even aware but also pretty much kickstarted the whole BMEM event that kept so many of us involved at HASA and the Henneth_Annun listserv over the years.

edrys, who was both a painstaking researcher and had a wicked sense of humor, and who devoted more hours than I want to even imagine to that site's resources section.

And, on a more personal note, tanaquilotr. We worked together more with the MEFAs than with HASA, I think, but it was HASA where we first met. Tanaqui is an incredibly talented author who really encouraged me creatively (she beta'd every story I wrote in that fandom for a long period, among other things) but she is also a wonderful friend, Frodo to my Sam in so many ways, and if HASA's only impact on me was introducing me to her, that alone would be worth a dirge or three.

... and here is where the list would get unworkably long very quickly if I let it. So if I haven't mentioned you, please don't take it as a slight. There are simply too many to mention by name. But the sad news about HASA has me thinking of all the work so many people contributed over the years. I know there were some people who didn't like the site, and I don't mean to whitewash its sites, but this news has me definitely appreciative of all the people who contributed to its upkeep.

IV.

And one last, utterly unrelated thing. Sherlockians, I commissioned Pocketsize People to create me a drawing of Molly and Sherlock doing science together, and I love it. Molly being the adventurous one, Sherlock just sitting there, the fact that of course the two of them would ignore the normal playground fun to poke a dead bird... I thought what she did with my idea was very cute. Tumblrites, feel free to like or reblog here where the artist will see it, but I'm also putting it behind the cut. (Perfectly SFW, but the image is a bit big, so...)

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On a grading break (yes, at 4:30 in the morning), I indulged in a news article I've been wanting to read for a while now: Scales of Justice: How a terrible Supreme Court decision about player pianos made the cover song what it is today, over at Slate. I don't suppose it's really news if it's about a Supreme Court Case from 1908, but you get the idea.

The gist of it: back in the 1890s, song-writers like John Philip Sousa made the bulk of their money from sheet music sales of their song. This was before even radio, so (aside from live performances) this was really the only way they made money off their songs. Then came the player piano which cut down on the need for sheet music but that, more to the point, involved sheet-music -- so claimed Sousa. It was a written notation that allowed the reproduction of their songs, but it was written in holes on a roll of paper player-pianos could read rather than the written notation an actual pianist relied on. So the argument was made (and the Supreme Court bought this!) that those player piano rolls weren't really sheet music because they couldn't be read by humans, meaning the player piano co. could create a roll that would let the piano play "Stars and Stripes Forever" without Mr. Sousa seeing a cent from it all.

In the wake of all this, Congress passed a law grafting player-piano rolls into the existing copyright system. But it also set up a pretty neat system where anyone who wanted to play a song could do so without the original composer's permission, under two conditions: the song had actually been released commercially, and the person replaying it paid a standard fee to the original creator So if a town band out in Butte, Montana, wanted to play "Stars and Stripes" at their fourth of July picnic they could do that without having to get Sousa's permission. But similarly, if a disillusioned blues musician (the timelines don't add up, but work with me) wanted to recast it in a minor key and put it in a larger, more critical work, he could do that too. Tweaking was allowed. It's how you get genius like John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," which the story points out takes the Rodgers + Hammerstein classic and uses it as the jumping-off point to do something quite different.



I found two things fascinating about all this. First, the law being described doesn't seem to care much about the musicians' rights to control their own creation once they'd put it out in public. At all. If Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't care for the places Coltrane took "My Favorite Things," they had to be paid the standardized fee but they couldn't really object to it being put to those purposes. Once it's out in public, it's there for anyone to reimagine and re-create however they saw fit. This system of standardized royalties made sure the original artists got rewarded for their creativity, but it didn't give them the right to control how their creation was used.

And the other thing? Well, there's a common assumption the article discusses that if original creators don't have a financial incentive in producing songs worth listening to, they won't bother. The interesting thing this shows is how much creativity comes from being able to effectively share and build on things. It's a no-brainer, really, but it makes sense as well: there's a balance to be found between rewarding creators and freeing them to create cooperatively.

Which brings me to fanfic. This is all about music, and legally it makes no real difference to us, but it has me thinking a bit about how much better the creative sphere would be if we applied this same kind of mentality to fiction. If the operating principle was finding a balance between commercial and professional recognition of talent and making the ideas and memes (and I do mean that in Dennet's and Dawkin's sense, not just photos of cats) available so others could develop and perfect them. I'm not saying I want to be paid for my art. The suggestion that that would validate me is itself, well, devaluing. What I'm saying is that it should be a measure of success if you inspire fanfic and fanart and whatever else that pushes people to work with your ideas. If it's professional art --which is just as valid as the fannish economy of exchanges and gifts and just flat-out creation done for the love of the material-- that recognition should come with a financial gain.

I'm not sure the standardized royalty thing is the right way to go about it since the works we're producing aren't for purchase. My point is that this system seems to incentivized sharing and subcreation while at the same time opening up a system where people could build on other peoples' work. And that's really kind of beautiful. I think that's one of the things that makes working with Sherlock Holmes so fun, it's from a universe that has been so developed by so many different people, film and pastiche and now fanfic and fanart, and where it seems wide open to reinvention because of that history and because Doyle was so sick of Sherlock he didn't seem too bothered by what different people did with him. There's this sense of being able to build on, complete that story. You got it in Tolkien a bit as well with the "other minds and hands" thing, though I don't think JRRT quite let go of his creation as much as ACD did.

Anyway, reading about this history it made me wish we had something more like this for the written word. It seemed to be a good way of encouraging creativity. And it's interesting history aside from that, I think.