Arctic Light

Not precisely part of the DVD commentary meme, but I was asked about Elaine (from Kismet) and her timeline in the comments to this Kismet page, so I got to ramble about the difference between the Elaine short stories vs. her appearances in the comic.

I think one thing that's been really interesting (and surprising) to me since I started up the webcomic again is how MUCH Kismet is lurking in my brain. I haven't actively worked on it since 2009, but it's pretty much all still there, in detail up to and including everyone's birthdates and the dates of important events (though some of it I have to work backward from the current date to remember) and, of course, an absolute shitload of detail on characterization, the current political situation, etc. The point, I guess, is that so far I haven't actually had to look up anything -- I've occasionally had my memory jogged on random bits of canon as I've been going through the old stuff (and I do have to look back at the Hunter's Moon pages to remember some of the minor visual details of the comic, like where the patches on Fleetwood's jacket are located), but it's really fascinating to me because it's all been buried in my brain so long and now that it's resurfacing, I don't feel as if I've lost any of it.

... as opposed to the often short-term way that I load information for fanfic when I'm in a fandom. I think this is maybe one of the key aspects of how my brain deals differently with my original worlds versus fan worlds, because while I'm actively reading/writing in a fandom, I have a tremendous amount of canon information front-loaded -- it is definitely all there, all the characterization stuff and the backstory and everything. But it starts to slip and get overwritten once I leave the fandom. I noticed towards the end of my time in SGA fandom, particularly, that I was failing at some of the canon details in the last couple of fics that I wrote for it. (Someone pointed out a detail in the comments to one of my very last SGA fics that made me realize I'd forgotten Rodney's lemon allergy. Um. Yeah.) I think I could still write for my old fandoms, but in most cases it'd be a struggle and I'd have to re-familiarize myself with canon first.

But the original worlds -- even the (absolutely ridiculous) fantasy-romance novel I wrote when I was a teenager is still all there, and without even looking at it, I bet I could sit down right now and write a conversation between any two of those characters that's still totally in character and has all their backstory intact, even though it's been 20 years since I wrote them or even thought about them. They still live in here.

Random link of the day: here is a nifty-looking comics anthology that is taking submissions on the theme of exploration, colonization and contact, if you are into that sort of thing!