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.
Tag Archives: PREACH
Why everybody hate benji? I need valid reasons!!
Um… so many reasons… and I haven’t read that book in awhile so I’m not the best resource for this. The fandom tends to hate on Benji bc:
- He’s a shameless Gary Stu
- He’s a child, maybe 12? Marius knows better (without spoiling anything, I’ll leave it at that).
- He smokes (not a character FLAW per se, but it seemed to be a cheap way to make him look “tough kid” or whatever)
- Emotionally/intellectually he’s flawless! He’s such an angelic person! He can do no wrong! Such characters are inherently unlikable maybe bc we can’t suspend disbelief for someone so PURE OF HEART.
- The way he talks seems oddly teenage? I remember someone saying that as a complaint.
Mostly we hate him because (and this can all be applied to Sybelle equally) of his existence, how he came into Armand’s life, and what happened to him seemed wildly out of the VC universe and out of character for everyone involved.
Here have some fanart:
It’s also the handling of race and race relations, I think. Benji is literally a 12-year-old Arab child that Sybelle’s abusive, controlling brother bought to be a companion to Sybelle. The family had been visiting the Holy Land when the parents got killed in a car crash, and so Sybelle was depressed and wouldn’t play the piano (she was a concert pianist and her brother was isolating and exploiting her like Colonel Parker on steroids). He got Benji to look after Sybelle, and engineer her behaviour, knowing Sybelle would do as Benji asked (i.e. look after herself, play the piano), and he hit Benji anyway.
It’s hard to explain the clumsiness of the writing, but it’s like… there’s this patina of attempts at evocative detail re: Benji’s clothing and the references he makes, but essentially the book sets up this situation where the quirky Arab kid gets bought by rich white Americans, and that’s bad because the situation is abusive, but then Armand saves them from the evil brother, so then everything’s YAY! And Benji’s such a funny little character!
I’d put it down to Anne Rice being kind of poor at handling gritty “realistic” modern situations (especially since the entire existence of Sybelle and Benji, and their entire circumstances, are there purely because she needed to retcon a character death away), and shoehorning them into her very heightened, stylised, dark fairytale, mostly historical books. So Benji having apparently been bought is talked off in hushed tones like Sybelle knows it’s a bad thing, but nobody seems very concerned to look into his origins or try and put him in touch with his family or anything. I mean, this is a kid who’s been taken across international borders illegally, presumably with fake papers! And now he lives with Sybelle and it’s all quirky and funny how he smokes like a chimney and goes out in the middle of the night in New York City and somehow this is all just… charcaterful! And okay, because he’s happy with Sybelle and Armand!
To be fair, a lot of this is basic Anne Rice tropes: a poor or ordinary child gets swept up by someone rich and given all the education/resources/stuff money can buy, and they are super-happy together and it’s a beneficial arrangement for both parties. Her books have a ton of this rags-to-riches stuff. But I think what makes it unsettling is when she crosses a cultural and racial border, with all the inherent echoes of slavery and colonialism that entails…
He’d been flat out kidnapped by Fox under the felonious terms of a long-term lease of bondage for which Fox paid Benji’s father five thousand dollars. A fabricated emigration passport was thrown into the bargain. He’d been the genius of the tribe, without doubt, had mixed feelings about going home and had learnt in the New York streets to steal, smoke and curse, in that order. Though he swore up and down he couldn’t read, it turned out that he could, and began to do so obsessively just as soon as I started throwing books at him.
In fact, he could read English, Hebrew and Arabic, having read all three in the newspapers of his homeland since before he could remember.
He loved taking care of Sybelle. He saw to it that she ate, drank milk, bathed and changed her clothes when none of these routine tasks interested her. He prided himself on the fact that he could by his wits obtain for her whatever she needed, no matter what happened to her.”
Endure, endure, and endure still.
And when you cannot endure, you can.
You fight, damn you.
You thrash and kick and rage and kill.
Endure because there is nothing else to do
and death is boring.
ooc;
Alright, so I feel like I need to make this a post. I hope I don’t come off as rude, but this is becoming a bit of a annoyance. People aren’t reading my rules and it’s frustrating me to no end. Though I will not name names — as they’ve all unfollowed me once I told them no — I feel like these incidents were a sign to make a small PSA:
Lestat is not some bleeding heart who will change because you beg him to. He is, and always will be, a brat. He enjoys toying with people and seeing how far gone he can make them. Yes, there is affection. And yes, there could be love. But odds are it won’t happen. You’d have to be something extraordinary to make Lestat that far gone. Yes, he’s flirty and smooth with your muse, but that does not equate true romantic interest. It’s mainly manipulation, and I’ve had that warning up ever since I made this blog.
Lestat will also not sleep with everyone who asks. Seriously, stop assuming he wants to have sex with your muse just because he wants to drain them dry. And don’t get fussy when I say ‘He’s not like that’. I’m not saying that sleeping with others is completely out of the question. It’s just not likely unless they really get his heart – figuratively – pumping. And if they’re able to accomplish that, it’s not really a good thing. I enjoy smut as much as the next lady or fella, but the thing is Lestat isn’t easy. He never will be easy. He’s as high maintenance as they come, so be prepared to work for it if you want it.
Unless your Louis in which case he’s all but rolling all over you for affection and attention whoopsSo there it is! My small, but necessary, PSA. I hope I don’t make anyone mad by saying this, but it’s getting out of hand and making me uncomfortable. Thanks for reading this as well! And now back to your regularly schedule Monsieur
PrissypantsLestat.
PREACH. I am tired of ppl treating all Lestats this way. He is NOT just a manwhore. To portray him as such would be ooc.
I doubt we’d all still be so madly in love with him if he was actually written that flatly.
And here, the biggest lesson of them all, and a summation of all the problems.
You are in the way of your story.
Hard truth: writing is actually not that important.
Writing is a mechanism.
It’s an inelegant middleman to what we do. It’s a shame, in some ways, that we even call ourselves writers, because it describes only the mechanical act of what we do. It’s a vital mechanism, sure, but by describing it as the prominent thing, it tends to suggest, well, prominence.
But our writing must serve story.
Story does not serve writing.
This is cart-before-horse stuff, but important to realize.
Listen, in what we do there exist three essential participants.
We have:
The tale, the teller of the tale, and the listener of the tale.
Story. Author. And audience.
That’s it.
You are two-thirds of that equation. You are the story (or, by proxy, its architect) and the teller of the story. The telling of the story is most often done through writing — through that mechanical act, and because it’s the act you can sit and watch, it’s the one that is used to describe our role. I AM WRITER, you say, and so you focus so much on the actual writing you forget that there’s this other invisible — but altogether more critical — part, which is what you’re writing.
So, what happens is, early on, you put so much on the page. You write and write and write and use too many words and too much exposition and big meaty paragraphs and at the end all it serves to do is create distance between the tale and the listener of the tale.
It keeps the audience at arm’s length.
Quit that shit.
Bring the audience into the story. This is at the heart of show, don’t tell — which is a rule that can and should be broken at times, but at its core remains a reasonable notion: don’t talk at, don’t preach, don’t lecture, don’t fill their time with unnecessary wordsmithy.
Get. To. The. Point.
Chuck Wendig, Five Common Problems I See in Your Stories (via vickiexz)
*mic drop*
How can you have lived for so long and still not get it?
Important. Truths.
(And vampires.)
#PREACH
“And books, they offer one hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.”
#PREACH
A misconception may be that people thinks he’s a hopeless emo.
Send me a misconception you think people have about my character and I'll explain if it's true or notooc; OH YES I’M GLAD SOMEONE SENT ME THIS ONE. To be honest, I feel like the super-whiny emo misconception stems partially from the movie? Because as much as I love the IwtV movie, I feel like there were some key things missing with him (which is honestly understandable with a movie adaption of a book).
The thing about Louis is that he actually doesn’t hate himself. Louis has an immense ego, which is something he himself spoke of in Interview with the Vampire. He’s such an immense perfectionist, I feel, that he doesn’t always know how to cope with his own failures. He falls into self-loathing because he honestly can’t deal with imperfections within himself. But even in his times of “brooding,” his ego still rears its head. He believed that he wanted to die in 1791, but could never let it happen. His ego wouldn’t allow it.
As a mortal man, Lestat “crushed his ego,” but once they were on an equal playing field as vampires, he began to see him differently and within his first night as an immortal, felt he was superior to Lestat. His feeding on rats was just as much a battle of pride as it was his sentimental feelings for humans.
Lestat and himself constantly get into these little ego battles, with the rats, with the Frenieres, with Claudia, with Lestat’s choices of victims, with Lestat’s every rash decision later on. Like, Louis definitely isn’t a pushover. One of the reasons Lestat made him was to be his “conscience,” and he certainly has to be an equal to serve that role.
Louis does go through periods where he just lets himself become apathetic and drift, but he never lets himself fade away and disappear.
Which I think is partially his ego and partially that he waits for Lestat to revitalize him like he’s fucking Sleeping Beauty and Lestat is Prince Charming. Honestly, they both need each other so much.I think the fact that Louis has never went to ground is a testament to his strength. And even when Lestat’s losing it, he generally remains sane and by his side until a point comes that he just can’t anymore and has to leave. Because Louis is very self-serving and capable of loving Lestat from a distance while Lestat’s doing something loony like Rowan fucking Mayfair.
99% of the time that Louis’ sitting around appearing emo, he’s just beating himself up for doing something wrong because~~~perfectionist first-born son.
Am I turning into a merciful-death reblogging blog? I’m sorry. It’s just that I agree with it so much and I can’t help but want to s h a r e.
† Hail Anne †
Hail Anne, full of talent
Thine Fandom is with thee.
Blessed are thou among authors
and blessed is the Vampire of thy creation: Lestat.
Holy Anne, Mother of VC, write for us peasants
now and at the hour we finish Prince LestatAnne Christ
#PREACH
I-want-my-IWTV 