Green Room - Week 4 - Day 3

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

Happy Valentine's Day!

Today is a day to celebrate love and your relationships and/or massacre a bunch of people. "Bladerunner" is obviously ahead of that particular curve, for combining them both!

Here at Idol, we recognize this thing called "love", and yes, Ms Raitt, we are indeed ready for it! How we express it though is by setting up polls and making contestants fight to the death! Or maybe for votes, but I'm pretty sure it's to the death!

The Second Chance poll is up http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/621791.html
and the deadline for the main competition is tonight: http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/620811.html so the evening will get off to a good start and romantic start as people ignore their loved ones to spend the evening on the computer reading Idol entries!

Comments

[cacophonesque.livejournal.com]

As long as you link to where your story is, I'll try to go read it!

I think that your entry two weeks ago was very powerful. As for the way your entry last week was received, it's partly a mystery. I mean, shit, I can't even count how many times I've been surprised in that way. I will say, for me, it didn't feel like the writing was as strong. It was a subject that I found interesting, but it didn't wham me in the way that the child dumping did.

Even though you wrote fiction this week, it was a window onto your world. For me it was exciting to see Australia! And I do like a lot of post-apocalyptic narrative, so that helped. But I think that the unfamiliar setting made it stand out to me. And the juxtaposition of the rather irrelevant conversation against the bleak reality of the situation was fun. I liked that it wasn't taking itself too seriously. I loved that the story had pretty much nothing to do with romance or unrequited love or anything of that nature (even though it was talking about sex!)

[comedychick.livejournal.com]

I asked Gary if I could link it in the GR when it's up, and he offered to link it for me. So I'll just wait until after the poll since he doesn't promote current contestants during a poll. But I'll also be sharing it on LJ and FB so between those three places, you should encounter the link. ;)

I suppose I could've handled the topic differently last week than I did. I think it's something I might address more in fiction in the future, as that tends to be where I explore some of my views these days, in a safer environment but which might have a greater impact on people. It's like how I try to have more diverse characters in what I write, especially non-straight characters, because I get sad about not seeing them more in the media I consume. Interestingly, it was only really in writing my entry last week that I realised how important it was for me to have major characters who aren't white. Since then, I started a short story with a major Indian character, and whilst I may not have made it particularly clear in my entry this week, Shen is meant to be Chinese.

Setting more fiction in Australia is a newer thing for me, too. Australia barely gets a mention in my novel, for example. But yeah, my fiction tends to be a good window into my world. Some of the bisexual stuff was taken from my own life. If I'd written non-fiction, it would've been about how bisexuals are seen as having a wider field of choices when it comes to partners, which is how it ended up in this fiction story instead. And the narrative itself, aside from the setting, is actually quite an Aussie flavour. The whole not taking it too seriously part in particular.

It also occurred to me that while writing it, I might be the only Australian playing Idol right now? That's a first for me!