coreomajoris:

liquorandptsdvarietyshow:

coreomajoris:

dduane:

beautifulfic:

I just got an email from an online friend I’ve not heard from for literally years. It was not the rekindling of the valuable friendship – one that had lapsed through neglect – which I’d hoped for. 

The middle and both ends of it was that I’m wasting my abilities writing fanfiction when I should be doing it professionally, and that while they’re disappointed in my lack of progress from when they knew me before, they’re not surprised by my failure.

(eyeroll) To quote an old associate of ours: what ineffable twaddle.

(“Begrudgery,” Peter said over my shoulder when he read the above: “that’s all it is.” And he’s right, because for proper begrudgery one must not only disparage another’s achievements but must suggest that one’s aware of an [allegedly] superior level of achievement which they ought to want to reach but [even if they did want to] never will.)

What you should be doing is what brings you joy. (As if there’s enough joy in the world, FFS.) That alone is reason enough to do it. That what you do brings joy to other people as well is icing on the cake.

Your “friend” seems low enough on understanding of where you’re at in this regard that I’d wonder whether they deserve the descriptor. I think you need one less “friend” like that.

(wanders off muttering)

I’m reblogging this with a little commentary of my own. When she was editing $LoveStory, the editor pointed out that it had gotten very dialogue-heavy in a manner you see in fanfic, and said something I _attributed_ to being sort of a “this is a habit one gets into when writing fanfic and one undoes when writing fiction in other contexts,” whether that was actually what she said or meant or not. Which I hadn’t even _thought_ about until then. What I responded with, because while we’re friends I’m not sure she really knew this, was something to the effect that “OH YEAH, hey, I hadn’t REALIZED that until now… but you know I’ve never finished and posted any fanfic right? I want to go do a lot of that TOO, like I don’t want to skip that experience.” (And lemme say that I haven’t looked up exactly what we said, but I did feel the pressure to “move on” from fanfic even if neither of us meant to be discussing it that way and what I was experiencing internal pressure and not anything she said. She can read this and chime in, s’all good.)

And it made me realize that I wanted to be able to both, but that I was going to resist any implication that I should in any way move on from fanfic because I was writing fiction in another context too. Cuz I _want_ the experience of writing fanfic for other people to enjoy, and the irony is that I now have 3 zine stories with original characters and a number of others in the works, and STILL haven’t posted any fanfic.

And there’s this whole other thing to discuss, about how I feel like my S2B2 stories live in this fun sweet spot of not being fanfic but feeling a lot like writing it, only you’re writing it about your own characters. Whether you _call_ that fanfic when you’re writing about your own characters or not, and I know people who don’t and people who do, it does create fiction that feels more self-indulgent at times, but man do I love it. Because honestly, I write well but I still write to indulge recreational impulses and I’m okay with that.

I actually moved on from Proper Writing to fanfiction. Or at least, from something more seemingly received as Proper Writing – my graphic novel is actually heavily ficitionalized but biographical, so really you could straight up call that Historical RPF. The thing is, though, that people didn’t, and when I started doing fanworks, and straight up treated them as valid works in my Art Scene, lots of my art friends were Very Sad about my having given up on art. That’s mostly changed now – largely because AmCap is a “crossover hit” to a certain extent – but at the same time, when people talk about AmCap, they really want me to say it isn’t fanfic, or they seem worried when they ask if it might be fanfic, like they are offending me by making a comparison between my work and a “lesser” style of work.  

Which is bullshit obviously. AmCap is totally fanfic, just like Emissary and Gulfport (wip) are, which are two long fics I did this Public Art Work thing with. I started doing fanfic again (obviously I wrote literal volumes of the stuff when I was younger. I’ve even got a copy of the very first one I wrote, which was for Biggles, and I was 7) precisely because I think fanfic is a) a really particular medium in which I can do really interesting things I can’t do with other mediums, even other kinds of fiction writing, and b) oh, also awesome? That and the fact that I know my skills as a writer and they are not world building. I’m a problematizer, an analyser, and a person who, if working on a TV show, would probably make it 99% bottle episodes (there’s a reason nearly everything I write has a fight in a car in it at some point).

And okay, admittedly, I’m really selective about the fanfic I post for the world to read and the fanfic I just share around secretly on email for fun/perverse personal confessions because I basically work out my life issues with gay porn, but don’t write gay porn as well as I do other things, and I am impressively, embarrassingly fucking precious about my Artistic Legacy. Which may make what I am saying ring a little hollow, but I promise I mean it with all my heart. I might really struggle with the community aspects of fandom, because I am a sensitive baby and also hate fun, but it’s really clear to anyone who reads or writes fanfic that this is one thing the medium offers that other mediums do not, at least not any other writing medium I can think of: being able to engage with a community by writing. Doing genre play with prompts. Having fun together. Speculating and coming up with multiple scenarios. Being imaginative together. Writing to a specific audience and figuring out what makes them happy or doesn’t. Dialogue. 

Fanfic also offers a lot of room for performance (like, as a community member in those dialogues, but also where it crosses over with RP, or stuff like I’ve done in the past, like maintaining a facebook account for one of the characters in a fic while writing the fic – he was the diagetic writer of the fic – and using the account to whine about having to write the fic, all very meta, I’m brilliant, etc).  

So like mostly this is just to say that I’m very familiar with the firm divide between fanfiction and o!fic, but particularly I think it is incorrectly made. It’s made as if there is a difference in quality, relevance, and usefulness, rather than what there actually is, which are differences in medium. Fanfic and o!fic do sometimes differ from each other in common genres within the medium, common manners and styles used, different audiences, different possibilities, different contexts. And of course they differ in respect, reward, and perception! But these differences are interesting. Artists should be interested in them. I think it’s really short sighted of writers to dismiss fanfic; it’s a very different medium in some ways, yes, but it’s not a lesser one. 

Which is a posh way of saying, OP, that I think your ex-friend is not only a bit of a dick but also not very clever.  

Also, coreomajoris, it’s interesting that you should say that about S2B2! It does read like it’s very influenced by aesthetics I’m familiar with in fandom, but mostly I think makes it feel that way is the sense of fun, but also the investment in character. I remember talking about my graphic novel at one point and saying “this feels good, this feels good to write, it’s like I’m writing fanfic.”

Yes, a lot of S2B2 stuff is absolutely very invested in characters. And that _does_ tend to make it feel good to write. I know that some of the authors have had a lot more experience with the romance genre than I’ve had, though I would make a case that the few Vampire Chronicles books I have under my belt were similar in some ways. I just… didn’t want to read romance based on what I inferred from the covers of what my classmates were reading in school, and yet I remember wishing there were the sorts of partnership, friendship, and romance that I _did_ like, when I was a school kid who was digging through whatever fantasy and sci-fi I could stand. I remember being deeply disappointed in the sexuality in whichever of Asimov’s full length robot novels I read, and being far more enthralled by Ender’s relationship with Jane in “Speaker For the Dead” and in “Xenocide.” 

I didn’t discover “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” until years later, and at the time, I was like “WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME READ SOMETHING WITH PLURAL MARRIAGE EWW” to Ben and he was like “SHUT UP AND KEEP READING YOU WILL LIKE THIS BOOK” and now, boy howdy, has that book influenced the way I write the dynamics of groups of friends who are in a movement. And you can trace some of these chains back from authors I love to authors they clearly love: how Connie Willis and Lois McMaster Bujold and Audrey Niffenegger make clear nods to Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, for instance. How a CRAPTON of people nod to the relationship between Holmes and Watson, for another, and that’s not just authors. It’s FASCINATING that we live in an era where there’s a fairly queerbaiting platonic male friendship version on TV, an avowedly homoromantic comedy between a straight man and a “butch homosexual” in a recent film version, an amazing friendship between a female Watson and a male Holmes on another TV show, and don’t get me started on House and Wilson. I MEAN WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE.

And don’t even get me started on all the versions of Tony and Steve, because holy CRAP. I’ll say that again: what a time to be alive.