Not an end of year recap
Dec. 28th, 2020 04:01 pmI have posted exactly one fic this year, so there's not much point in doing a roundup of writing or anything. I do have three Star Wars stories I could still potentially finish -- I thought I'd give up on everything after RoS but now that there's been a little time to process I think I can get away with just ignoring everything about it without explanation, whether it's a story set in the same time period or in the future.
I fantasize about a regular Dreamwidth posting schedule in January. We'll see.
If you follow me on Twitter, you know I've fallen into a bizarre and embarrassing spiral of reading bandom fic. I don't even go here, I was neither into it when it was an active fandom nor into the music back before then. I'd like to say I was too old and too cool, and maybe I was a little too old (I am... older than half of FOB?) but the only music I listened to was what I could swing dance to. To this day I hate talking about what music I'm "into," those conversations have a magic power to throw me back into feeling like I'm in high school and "what kind of music do you like" is a code for your entire social identity.
Anyway this is all the fault of my non fannish friend who's DMing a game of the Witcher tabletop RPG for a group of us and is very sweet and serious about it. I had no idea what I wanted to do for a character, with the party it seemed like we needed a human who could make money and do the talking to other humans so I was like "I'll be a bard I guess" and then I thought it would be funny if I actually played recorder when my character played music, I already have a bunch of recorders, and then I thought it would be even more fun if I found stuff the other players would like, so I went back to a conversation they'd had on our discord server about bands, and there had been a whole long thread about emo, so after I learned a LoTR medley and a Muse song I decided to do The Black Parade, and I was like "I'll just transcribe it myself this time rather than trying to find sheet music and then adapting it" like a person with no sense, so I pulled up the video on YouTube since I don't have spotify or whatever and watched it on repeat for 2 hours while writing it down, and then I was like, hmm, I remember this was like a whole thing, a whole fandom, what if I looked on the ao3 for fic.
At least one person sang along to my epic recorder cover over the video conference so I'll call it a win.
We won our first fight last session against some wraiths. I'm planning on using the ukulele basics I've been working on during the pandemic and singing The Unquiet Grave next session to celebrate. I haven't performed singing in front of people ever in my life, I refuse to even sing at karaoke, so I'm kind of terrified but also I want to? If I survive that, next it's got to be Chicago Is So Two Years Ago because DM is a sweet boy from Chicago who misses it very much and also he said "dude take this to your grave is all bangers, front to back." This is 10x more terrifying. Also one of my housemates only ever leaves the house to do martial arts in the park and the other one isn't on the same schedule so when she gets back from this monthlong trip and is done quarantining I'm going to have zero time alone in the house to practice. The singing bits, and ridiculous sounding vocal exercises I should probably do because I have no idea how to sing? Everyone in the house plays instruments and is chill about practicing them at least. It's weird to be suddenly back into it and talking to housemate S about music theory. I played clarinet pretty seriously as a kid and also dabbled in piano and sax and since it's not a thing most people do as adults I both forget I used to do it and also forget that not everybody had access to that education at an age where it just sinks into your brain and you don't have to think about it to read music and can just kind of figure out how to play things on any instrument after a basic explanation of the technique.