Welcome to the conversation!

juniemoon, I can't tell you how happy I am to see you here! Your essays and engagement really set the tone for the Moon Garden and folks have been saying lately how much they miss having a place like that at Atop -- as you can see, Q3 decided to keep the Moon Garden thread intact in the Salon and create a new thread for ongoing discussion. Your essays always brought attention to the meta aspects of fandom which really interest me, but which don't always fit in a fast-paced news thread.

You've done a great job getting a freelance/contracting writing career going so quickly -- it often takes years to make it big enough to keep you going on its own. How do you find the self-marketing aspect? I freelanced for a few years and found that part the most challenging ... I can sell anything on paper, but don't make me do it face to face!

That's a GREAT graphic -- menacing, funny and vertiginous all at once, much like spending time in the right brain or wherever we think the creative work originates these days (they've debunked the left/right hemisphere theory, haven't they?).

I love your image of the reptilian brain getting control of the keyboard and the mouse -- that would explain a lot!



I just don't understand why the reptilian brain gets triggered, since theoretically the distance afforded by telecommunication should reduce the sense of threat, not increase it. I do think the anonymity of internet communication brings out the worst in some folks, and I also think that fans develop a sense of ownership the longer they stay with an artist. In Adam's case, he came to us through a TV show that encourages ownership and buy-in by fans, and then when he lost the competition, many fans' protective instincts were engaged and never quite let go again. But as nocturnal points out above, we do see the same bad behaviour even in far different situations, as in those Queen fans who now seem to feel they have a better sense of what's appropriate to do with Queen's legacy than the original members do. I recall Roger complaining about that once and retorting, "It's OUR fucking legacy!"

augenpoesie, lovely to see you and thank you so much for contributing some of your beautiful, evocative photos. Not all pictures are worth a thousand words, but yours are -- and then some! You show very clearly that you don't have to be a writer to have something to say and say it powerfully. I think all the most important things we ache to say are impossible to fully say in words anyway (see my signature line from Heschel below) -- or as Laotsu said, "The Dao that can be spoken is not the true Dao." For me, words are a thread I follow through my own dark tangled woods, or I try to arrange them around the living heart of something I feel or intuit but can't fully see or grasp -- sometimes they help me see its outline.

And your English is VERY good!

Thank you for the warm welcome. I am so looking forward to joining such a wonderful group of fellow glamberts that enjoying creating art if all kinds. I should say that poetry is my the only writing ability I posses, a really good narrative has always escaped me . I can't take decent picture to save my soul , my subjects are usually missing body parts particularly their head. As for quilting or any other type of painting etc. let's just I hate to see a quilt I made a picture I painted . It could be down right frightening. I admire those who can do these things so much and can't wait to see some examples the work all of you do. Lastly I want to thank you on behalf of all my coworkers who will no longer be forced to listened to my poetry.

Hello, toramenor (care to tell us about your screen name?), and welcome! You're right, I think a discussion of "voice" definitely belongs here -- it could go so many ways, whether we want to go back to the discussion of appropriation of voice (cultural appropriation) that Adam weighed in on a little while back, talk about how to find our own authentic voice or, as you point out above, whether we, like Adam, may have many authentic voices.

I think one of the things that really tickled me when I began watching more Adam interviews and concert footage was how many voices/faces/personas he could inhabit, and how he didn't care a fig whether they were consistent or not. I had somehow internalized the idea that all my values and expressions should be consistent -- I dunno, there seemed to be some virtue in it. But, watching Adam, it struck me very strongly that he has many true selves or facets and yeah, some of them are contradictory. I know there were folks who felt he pulled a "bait and switch" with his "boy next door" cuteness and almost squeaky-clean, non-threatening presentation on I dol versus what came later, but both sides were always there (see especially the highly eroticized "Ring of Fire" and "Whole Lotta Love" especially). Many of us have commented over the years on those wonderful moments when he pulls out of a down-and-dirty onstage rut and gives that self-aware, "isn't this hilarious? and fun?" grin. I think it's our own dualistic, "if something is this then it can't also be that" thinking that wants to put a limit on that -- similar to our resistance to fluidity in gender.

Oh, and perfectionism -- that's a beast! Are you also a "P" in the Myers-Briggs type indicator? P's tend to love starting things but much as you said above, once the creative work of figuring out the shape of the story or project is done, actually finishing it bores them to death, looking like drudgery. The biggest bete noir between me and my work is a kind of morbid self-co0nsciousness, but the beast's teeth were probably filed sharp by perfectionism. I'm jealous of your many ideas, though -- I'm still at the stage of clearing all the debris away that has blocked that channel. I'm glad we can give each other courage along the way, whatever we face, though -- drudgery can be as fearsome as anything!

(I can't write )

Thanks for the welcome. The explanation for my screen name is longish, but since you asked, I'll try to explain where it came from and what it means. It is actually a name in a made-up language (made up by me for a novel I started writing 10 years ago and never finished!). This made-up language (oh, did I mention I am a linguist and fascinated by languages? - that should explain a lot) is called the First language and its status in the world of my story is not unlike Latin is to us today - a dead language used occasionally for specific purposes and known only by scholars. The difference is that the importance of the First language is much greater in my story because it is the language in which certain prophecies have been written. Anyway, the characteristics of the First language are such that the meaning of a word/phrase can be divined only from context - in other words, it is very difficult to interpret and a single sentence can have as many interpretations as there are those who try to study it. However, it is the ultimate language, language of Fate: it can express every single thing in existence, even the most abstract ideas and relationships, the most mystical and the most metaphysical. (Probably why it's so difficult to understand and interpret.) Ordinary people, of course, don't speak or read it, but what remains is the tradition of using the First language for proper names - names for people, cities. Most people will know at least what their own name means, as well as the names of their friends and family, but usually not more than that. My screen name is the name of one of the main characters in the novel and it consists of 3 words: TOR a MENOR. In the most basic interpretation, "tor" means darkness, "menor" means light and "a" is a preposition which means "from-into" or which juxtaposes two opposing things, such as darkness vs. light. There are several unusual things about the name. First of all, it is a male character, and traditionally, the word menor (light) is found only in female names. Secondly, people's names are never about a confict, or opposition. Thirdly, the character's mother, who named him, was a bit of a scholar who studied the First language and so it's odd that she should name him thus. I won't go into an explanation of why this character is named so, although there is a very good reason, important for his story. I will say that at some point he realises his name is a prophecy in itself and it actually means "darkness together with light" and that it is not about an opposition but about the blending of the two concepts. (Think about the yin-yang symbol, it's similar to what I'm saying.)

Even though I never finished this story, I still love the names I made up for the purposes of this "First language". Since the names really have no other meaning than what I dreamt up, they are also ideal for usernames and passwords on the Internet - no one can just stumble onto one of my passwords, 'cause I use long made-up character's names and similar. My first e-mail address, which I still use, is toramenor; and I have used Toramenor as a username for other sites, like youtube, so when I decided to register here, I just picked it.



It is also my understanding that most people put themselves into boxes. It can be a consequence of the environment, of the outside world "telling" you: you are this, you are not that, but the outside world is not the main culprit - your own brain is. In terms of gender, the world tells you: You are a boy, you are not a girl, and boy is this.... so you are this.... It is actually a logical fallacy--human brain is highly logical and it will latch onto what sounds logical, but if you start from a false premise, you cannot reach a true conclusion. If you make false assumptions, you are bound to give yourself a false set of rules. Some people escape the false premise; some may change their opinions and points of view later in life if they realise their premises were false; others, unfortunately, will never change their mind, because they cannot or will not open themselves to the possibility that their starting point is false. I am thankful that I was able to either completely avoid false premises or see their fallacy very early on in my life, as a child. I can't know how it really happened - I think it's probably because I am a highly imaginative, thoughtful, analytical person. As a child, I read books and thought about everything I read, going further in my imagination than the actual writer. My parents and my teachers could not tell me what to think, because I understood that my thoughts were outside of their realm. And I also understood that my thoughts were what made me and that my imagination was infinite. I think when a person has that as a starting point, it is highly difficult for the outside world to tell you who you are or what you ought to be thinking. It's not even about needing to think outside the box; it's about realising that there never was a box to begin with. The box does not exist, unless you create it with your own mind.



There is some truth to it. Drudgery is boring. Not that the unfinished stories themselves bore me - I still go back to stories I started years ago and enjoy reading them and thinking about them, and I often add bits and pieces to them. This tells me that I haven't lost interest in telling those stories or exploring those thoughts and ideas. My curse is that I am interested in everything I can wrap my imagination around and I think I am like an explorer who does not have a specific goal but will allow any single thing she encounters along the way to cause her to swerve from the path. For me, it's not like walking along a road and stopping a moment to smell the flowers. For me, it's more like this: Ooh, look, a pretty flower! I need to stop and examine it. I need to smell it, I need to find out its name, its purpose, can it be found anywhere else?, which insects like it?, does it have any healing properties?, there is a story of a secret garden in which such flowers grew and they had magical properties, and a thief came and stole one of the magic flowers... lol