style stockholm syndrome

I've been thinking on whether to post this or not, but because I'm me, and because I ended up tagging for it, and because it exists, what the heck.



Starting the last week in June to now, I've read 364 Due South.

95 first.person
7 not.applicable
1 omniscient.person
3 second.person
258 third.person

I'm getting 26 percent first person or thereabouts. To me, that's fairly cool because at some point this last week it went invisible; I didn't notice it and didn't remember to tag for it after reading and had to go back and look it up manually.



The thing that makes me vaguely uncertain is that my reading is highly slanted toward authors that I already know, and specifically, a group of authors I already know (and seriously, Ces makes like one eighth of my total reading; that's a hell of a curve). I read associatively and by rec page by the following priority: a.) people I know from SGA to b.) people I know from SV to c.) people who had fic I liked a lot in other fandoms to d.) rec lists to e.) things people throw at me in livejournal entries that involve kittens and help ease the pain of the loss of Handy, which I may never recover from.

House Style

You know, despite the fact I am not running a strange fannish social experiment (honestly, I am always and forever into this for the porn), I did want to share this.

I wrote a fic last week and haven't posted for dS when I was around one hundred something stories in. This was--hmm. Actually, closer to ten days ago. This weekend, however, I started writing something else, just for myself to work on voice, since pure dialogue entertains me. Ran into a problem I'm not sure I've ever run into before, and by that, I mean, not unless I've been deliberately working on something that's against what I usually write and need to adjust back.

This weekend, I couldn't remember how to write third person limited in a way that was actually readable.

It took me a couple of hours to figure out why my rhythm was off. And it was off, and not just off, but badfic level sentence structure nightmare off, weird loss of single point of view off. At a glance, it looked a mess. At not a glance and spending time trying to repair, I realized I was trying to write past tense first person instead and kept correcting myself to present while writing. I mean, that's the only explanation I can work out. The problem wasn't even the story--it was all in present with correction. But I wrote it like someone who wrote it in past tense first and then went through and changed the verbs and pronouns only, which to be honest, is pretty much what I was doing even if I wasn't aware of it. And I wasn't thinking in present at all; I was thinking in past. And there is, at least for me, a dramatically different way I visualize and construct a scene, much less write it, depending on tense.

Personally, I have no idea whether to find this hilarious or disturbing. I know as of this last week for the Doctor Who and the other dS fic, I was not doing that. But as of Sunday afternoon, I was and I'm still not entirely adjusted back.

I really want to call this fannish Stockholm Syndrome. Or Fangirl Borg? I have no idea. It's very cool in a very strange way. On one hand, I haven't changed my default style since SV and at least part of that change was deliberate (and when ClarkLex had that person come in to complain about present tense, I might have decided that God as my witness, I will never write past tense again or something). On the other, that change wasn't entirely conscious either; part of the reason I picked up third/present was that most of my reading was in that tense (aka thete1 et al) and it was, in some ways, easier to match what I was reading than it was to try to work against it.