Fandom Meme, 15 follow-up questions

[osprey_archer]

asakiyume asked a couple of follow-up questions for the fandom meme question 15 yesterday (“15. What was the first thing you ever contributed to a fandom?”), which I thought I’d answer in their own post.

15a. Had you been writing original fiction before 19, but Torchwood gave you your first push to write fanfic, or---?

Oh yes, I had written three execrable novels before I was 19. When I was in third grade I wrote a Holocaust novel; Number the Stars was very formative. When I was in eighth grade I wrote a secondary world fantasy novel, about which I remember almost nothing, although I’ve still got some old maps from the story. When I was 16 I wrote Julia, the tale of a telekinetic girl forced, forced I tell you, to go to an ordinary high school after her teachers at the Academy decide that she is just a little too disdainful of the hoi polloi.

(Julia may have been a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, I can neither confirm nor deny.)

I read a lot of fanfic in high school, and I wrote a few short pieces for RL friends, particularly for The West Wing. But The West Wing was an intimidatingly high-quality canon to post fic for (and the fic was intimidatingly high quality too!), whereas Torchwood, and I say this with love, was a hot mess.


15b. How did your original fiction and your fan fiction feed baby-writer you?

Okay, so the thing about fanfiction is that (presuming you are writing for a reasonably active canon) there are people who want to read it. You do not have to buttonhole your friends in the locker bay and bribe them with cookies and browbeat them six months later (my teenage self had no shame) when they still haven’t read your latest magnum opus, and suspect on the basis of their guilty twitchy look that actually they did read it, and hated it, and will never, never tell you.

In the world of fanfic! In the world of fanfic, absolute strangers to you will read your work voluntarily. They will leave comments! Sometimes those comments will consist solely of keysmashes because you made them feel SO MANY feelings! Sometimes they curse your name because you made them cry, and you lift your face to heaven and cackle with satisfaction like a minor evil god.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Thank you! This is great, all of it. We feel for the Artist as a Young Girl; being consigned to an Ordinary high school is HARD!

What you say about the feedback and love you get when you write fanfic! Whoa--that just does seem wonderful.

My dad had an experience kinda-sorta a little like that. He'd always been a litfic writer, writing novels that were respectable and got good reviews but were not, y'know, best-sellers or widely beloved. But for some reason late in life he started writing short fiction that could be called speculative, and he sent them to places like Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine and Asimovs, and they got published. And then, because it's genre and not the litfic world, people would start **talking** about the stuff and he found out people loved it. He was so blown away because people were just so much more friendly and effusive and interactive in the genre world than they were in the litfic world.

[osprey_archer]

To be fair my high school was actually quite unusual, but being a teenager is HARD, so the Artist as a Young Girl probably still deserves our sympathy.

That's so great that your dad found a community that loved his work and SAID so, rather than cooing over his books in private as I'm assuming the litfic world did. Writing can really feel like screaming into an abyss sometimes, and it's so great to find a community that openly loves your work!

[kore]

Sometimes they curse your name because you made them cry, and you lift your face to heaven and cackle with satisfaction like a minor evil god.

....and you REGRET NOTHING

[osprey_archer]

Regrets are for the weak, and minor evil gods know them not.

[tei]

you lift your face to heaven and cackle with satisfaction like a minor evil god yes!!!!!

[osprey_archer]

Few wicked pleasures offer a glee as pure as this.