Another Dumpster Dive

We've got a long weekend ahead, here in Canada: Victoria Day, or something. I haven't decided whether to take Monday off, or no. On the one hand, I was just getting to a good bit in the novel. On the other hand, I was messing it up, thanks to overwork and general exhaustion. Today, for example, I used an Italian word by mistake. It was in a clump of dialogue, which made it especially egregious. No-one in Giant Rats speaks Italian.

That's not the worst part, though. No--see, I read that clump of dialogue several times, trying to see what should come next, and I didn't notice the foreign word. I didn't realise it had happened till I tried to use the same word again. It was Donizetti's fault. I was listening to Lucia di Lammermoor. The music must've insinuated itself into the word part of my brain, and made me put something stupid.

Sod this. I'm too tired to write a journal entry. Instead, I'll post something I wrote last weekend, when I was also very tired:

I've been in another of those moods, lately. You know the ones: I don't want to read, eat, sleep, draw, or watch TV. Thus, having nothing better to do with my time, I decide to have an Internet scavenger hunt. Only, I'm not looking for coins or Easter eggs, or even free software--I'm out for rubbish. The worst of the worst, sort of thing. Last time, it was bad writing, in general. The time before, it was something involving pizza farts and AOL. (I can't remember too clearly. I think that's a defence mechanism.)

This time, it was fan fiction. Fan fiction, if you ask me, is plagiarism at its most inept: the setting's lifted, the characters are lifted, and half the time, the plot's lifted, and all. The writer adds as little of his own voice as possible, for fear of riling up the fans. A successful piece of fan fiction is one that reads like the original work might have done, had the writer been ill with scarlet fever. See, fan fiction readers want everything to stay as close to the source material as possible. Most of the time, only one detail gets changed, and that functions as the premise of the story. For instance, you could have Final Fantasy, but the black and white mages are gay, or The Diary of Anne Frank, but a character from a Japanese cartoon destroys Hitler*.

At any rate, this is a tired old soapbox: everyone knows how I feel about fan fiction. I didn't raise the subject for the sole purpose of spewing vitriol (though it did feel quite good). No--I've got a discovery to share. Well, a theory, in any case. A hypothesis, at the very least. Having read sample paragraphs from, oh, about fifty fan fictions, each by a different author, I have reached a stunning conclusion: I did not read fifty works by fifty separate authors, at all. Instead, I read fifty works by one author, writing under fifty assumed names. All fan fiction, indeed, is penned by this one berk, who has even less of a life than I do.

Yes. That's my theory. Somewhere, if I'm to be believed, there's a guy in front of a computer, typing three thousand words per minute, and all of them worthless. You can't mistake his work for anyone else's. He has a distinctive style, marked by the following conventions blunders:

1) He doesn't like proper nouns, and will go to insane lengths to avoid calling anyone by name. As a result, it's often impossible to tell who's doing what to whom.

2) The word "said" disgusts him on a visceral level. If you've got something to articulate, you'd better exclaim, cry, mutter, murmur, grind, hiss, or ejaculate it. Or, wait, no--don't ejaculate it. You don't want to ejaculate in the land of fan fiction. Bad things can happen. Awful things.

3) Colours bother him. He never describes anything as blue, grey, green, or purple. Instead, everything corresponds to a plant, a weather condition, or a gemstone. The sky is cornflower, Grandma's hair is stormy, and the main character's eyes are emerald (except when he's mad, at which time they assume a jadey cast).

4) He loves synonyms...and near-synonyms, and might-be-synonyms, and words with similar stems. In his world, there is no difference between discretion and discrepancy, and orbs is a wonderful substitute for eyes.

5) He's a man of many words. He believes there's a word for every occasion, and he is the man to supply it. When he can't think of one on his own, he breaks out the thesaurus. Unfortunately, he leaves the dictionary on the shelf.

6) He knows there should be punctuation. He's not so sure where it should be.

7) Someone once told him the eyes are the windows to the soul, and he took it very seriously. Forget the soul--according to this guy, you can look into someone's eyes and see what they had for breakfast...twenty years ago. Conversely, if you can't see somebody's eyes (or if they haven't got any eyes), it's impossible to gauge how they're feeling. He also believes emotions influence weather patterns, hand size corresponds to penis size, and so forth. He's a walking encyclopaedia of clichés, adages, and urban legends.

8) He doesn't have a nose, and assumes no-one else does, either. This becomes a problem in romantic scenes, where kisses lead to near-asphyxia. Come to think of it, his anatomy is funny in quite a number of ways.

9) He's a bit of a show-off. Sometimes, he sticks in a simple equation or a phrase in a foreign language, just for kicks. The area of a triangle equals one half namae wa Kusojiji. (Sometimes, he messes up and writes something embarrassing.)

10) He has awful taste in music. You wouldn't think this would affect his writing, but it does. He often works popular lyrics into his prose, passing them off as his own words. (On a personal note, I must point out that I discovered this tendency because he always picks lyrics I hate!)

11) When he makes a typo, he just leaves it there. People will know what he meant.

Here's an example: if Ratty's Ghost were fan fiction, instead of some daft hoser's journal, this entry, from October 17, 2005, might've gone something like this:

"What do you want to do"? Asked the brunette.

"Dunno." Replied the blonde.

"Socar"? Queried the curly-haired troublemaker.

"I don't know." The wrinkly-shirted future artist didn't know. "Do you guys want to go swimming at the town pool on South Main Street? It would be fun. I love to swim. Hee hee hee". She giggled dizzily.

"It's Too cold." The brunette flanged her pretty lip.

"Okay, do you guys want to eat?" Asked the skinny girl.

"No, it's too early, baka." Everyone crowded around the short-haired girl and started hitting her with their algebra books.

"Then I don't know." She vended off the mathematical texts with a vengeance.

"Okay" Exclaimed the blonde, "I know! Let's go spy on Mr. Cheng"!

The young artist's friends wanted to spy on the older Chinese man because, like James Gandolfini, he was born to play a Mafia capezio. But the chocolate-eyed artist had another motive. She thought about his long glossy hair and wild man tattoos, and had to stifle a sigh. He was so beautiful, with his (blah, blah, blah)....

What an embarrassing story! Why did I put that in my journal, to begin with? The fan fiction lens is an improvement: the harder it is to tell I once had a crush on some hippie-arsed neighbour, the better.

At any rate, sometimes the guy who writes all the fan fiction gets a copy-editor, referred to in such circles as a "beta reader." When this happens, his spelling and grammar is slightly better, and it may occasionally be possible to determine who's speaking, who's being tied to a rabid donkey, and what-have-you. Most of the time, however, he offers his writing to the public in its natural state. (He can't use a mechanical spellcheck because he has some weird, arcane version of Windows that only includes Notepad, Solitaire, and Internet Explorer.)

I have a funny feeling about this guy. I think I might know him from somewhere. His disturbing sex fantasies seem oddly familiar--not in the sense that I might have shared them, but in the sense that I might have made fun of them already. His grammar rings a bell, too.

Oh, that's right. I get it. I met him on AOL, didn't I?

* Ordinarily, I make up examples, to avoid offending any actual rubbishmongers. In this case, however, I have not.