I've been watching a bunch of marching band and football movies and tv shows lately (because I'm working on a college marching band story that is just different enough from the type I'm watching that I can still watch them).

Earlier, I watched Varsity Blues, which is so, so terrible and cheesy in so many ways, but still hits me right in the feelings at a couple key points. (Also, I used to listen to the soundtrack during music competitions in high school, when I needed to clear my head from what we were actually playing. I have this sharp memory of stretching out in the sun a couple hours before my district solo competition one year and listening to "Horror Show" and "My Hero" on repeat.

I'm in the middle of Drumline: A New Beat (which is still pretty much the perfect college drumline story for me), and it is a little bit too close to what I'm actually writing for me to really want to be watching it, but I've already been sucked into the rewatch, so I'll finish it. It is so much fun, and I was charmed anew by the fact it actually addresses gay black men and the intersectional identities they have to navigate. (I wish it did the same for queer black women.)

This is my favorite time of year because of marching band (and Halloween and family holidays), but it is a difficult time of year, too, and I can feel myself slipping into a depressive cycle. I'm hoping to be able to keep writing this draft; I'm about 30k into it, and I think it will finish at around 75k, so I'm well underway.

December Talking Meme Master List

(There are still some days left open in the meme, if you want to suggest a(nother) topic.)

Day 4 was suggested by umadoshi, What's your relationship with old fandoms (your own previous fandoms) like?

Except for one-off fandoms I only write to create a gift for someone else (Dawson's Creek, for example; it's on my to watch list, but when I wrote the Dawson's Creek section of Ten Slayers Who Never Were (The Of All the Women in All the World Mix) for nikitangel, I did a lot of research and had someone who liked the show take a look at it), I tend not to have previous fandoms, in that they once were my fandom but no more. My first online fandom was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, circa season two and the Willow/Angel mailing lists (and then the spin-off list of awesome), and I still write Buffy fic sometimes. (Often in crossovers, because, as you may notice from the fic I just referenced, I love making women from other fandoms slayers.) The Lost Boys was my second online fandom, and I still write it occasionally. So mostly, my relationship with my old fandoms is pretty damn great. I miss some of the people who used to write fic and meta in my old fandoms, but it's still pretty awesome.

However, there is one previous fandom that I broke up with and broke up hard: Glee. I only steadily watched during the second half of season two, when wakeupnew introduced me to the joy that was Lauren Zizes. (I did then go back and watch all of season two at that point, and I'd already seen pieces of season one when it first aired, before I got so fed up with the treatment of half the characters I couldn't take it anymore.) I was all set to watch season three, and then Zizes wasn't a big part of it anymore and I was already pissed off about the racism and biphobia that I just couldn't do any more. And then I made the mistake of keeping up with meta even though I wasn't watching, and it made me angry and bitter, and in the end, I couldn't even finish the stories I had in progress. Which sucked, because I loved them, particularly my believed marching band AU series, The Marching Band Refused to Yield, but no. I couldn't. I still can't. I do sometimes pull up the next story in that series, just to see if I can finish it, but I can't. Glee infuriated me with the choices the creators made, and I just can't. I've never felt so frustrated by a fandom in which I still wanted to create, but couldn't.

So that's how I feel about my old fandoms. Awesome, awesome, awesome, OMGWTF GLEE.