DONE with finals! *flops onto floor* Now I can start mucking around with some of my ideas/plot-bunnies properly.

One of the books I had to read for my Foreign Literature - Russian class this semester was "The Fur Hat" by Vladimir Voinovich, where middle class Russian citizen Yefim Rakhlin goes on a self-inducted campaign of getting a better fur hat. The reason? The Soviet Writer's Union, of which the man is a member of, were distributing fur hats depending on the member's status; the higher status one is, the better the fur hat will be, like mink. Yefim, who had written 11 different books and had served the military, assumed that he'll at least get rabbit fur, which is somewhat respectable. Instead, he gets a fluffy tomcat hat, which is pretty much lowest of the low -- compare that to one of his pals who gets deer fawn and only wrote one book. Yefim, writer of 11 titles, gets fluffy tomcat while his coworker and friend, writer of just one book, gets deer fawn? The indignity! Righteous pride leads that campaign where he tries to appeal to higher power (nigh impossible since this was pre-perestroika) to get a better fur hat. Problem, what he writes is neither for nor against the government, which in their eyes lowers his social standing; his Jewish background doesn't help things either.

Mind, it wasn't just the events of him trying to get a better hat that caught my attention. It was the parts where he's trying to get his colleagues/friends to read what he had written. He writes about "decent people rising to the challenge" and those 11 books that had been published has apparently lead to giving him a bit of a swelled perception, despite his demur attitude. Two of the stories mentioned in "Fur Hat" struck me mildly funny and ironic. Funny in that the plots used would be a cookie-cutter base that a very new fic writer might use (depending), and ironic in that he's sold 11 of these simplistic-to-no-plot titles and is living with import furniture. He insists that titles should be one word, because Russian crossword puzzles are one word; he gives the events but makes no mention of the surroundings (evident when one of his pals reads an earlier work and is confused when Yefim asks if his friend read the story's character noting the North Star, when there was no mention of it); and he expects praise from his colleagues, despite his friends thinking otherwise, and becomes extremely disappointed when they try to offer constructive criticism (like kicking a puppy).

Strange, isn't it? I guess half of us were like him when we first started out in whatever fields of fandom, be it drawing or writing or whatever. It's also that when I read new fics done by new authors, sometimes I get the sensation that they expect praise and aren't able to handle constructive criticism when they get that instead. Heh... Not sure, but that's probably what struck me as ironic and twisted funny.

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