Fandom Snowflake Challenge 2020 - Day 2

[maplemood]

Challenge #2

In your own space, talk about your fannish history.

The short answer is that I have a short one, at least when it comes to fandom online. I got an AO3 account in 2017; before then I'd never written fic, though I had been reading fic and lurking since my last year or so of high school. I read a lot of Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean fanfic, then moved on to Sherlock and eventually the Marvel Netflix shows. I discovered most of those fics through the TV Tropes Fanfic Recs pages, and as I read more and more I began playing out my own scenarios and what-ifs in my head, which I'd always done anyway, just never with the option of writing those stories down and sharing them online. And I didn't want (or thought I didn't want) to write my own fics for a good couple of years, since I figured that devoting so much time to unpublishable work--not that any of the original stories I was trying and failing to write back then were particularly publishable--would be a waste. 

I eventually broke after going through a terrible stretch of writer's block. I'd read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, which makes the point that it's more important to write what you want to be writing than to write what you think you should be writing, and I was also so miserable that at that point I honestly didn't care if I never wrote another original story again. My first fic wasn't especially good, and I never finished it, but it was an idea I liked, I had fun with it, and it opened up the floodgates: I wrote and wrote and wrote, more or less constantly, for the first time in years. After Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 came out I found my way into that fandom, started actually interacting with people and making friends, and I haven't looked back (not much, anyway) since. 

Fandom is in a lot of ways a mixed bag for me: even though I wish I didn't, I still do worry about wasting time and not working on more professional writing; putting a story up online means it's there, in all its awkward, typo-ed, too-earnest glory (which is the exact same problem I'd have with original work, and at least on AO3 I can go back and edit if I spot a really outrageous mistake); and there are certain parts of certain fandoms that I...really, really, profoundly don't click with. But all the mixed-bag elements are still part of why I love fandom as a whole--you don't need to write perfectly, or be very sure of yourself, or agree with every hot take that comes across your dashboard. There's a place for everybody, a place to create new stories and find new friends and love new stories, whether they happen to be meticulously line-edited or not. 

Oh! And I went back to check fanfiction.net for the two fics--one LOTR, one POTC--that were the first I ever read all the way through. The LOTR one is Misfit in Middle Earth, about a grad student who falls into Middle Earth, misses out on most of the high romance, but ends up charting her own (fun and moving) course anyway, and the POTC one is Memories of May, a Barbossa/OC story that's also fun and moving, and the first in an (unfinished) series. 

Comments

[james]

I have re-read some of my own fanfic stories years after putting them on AO3 and discovering typos. ::facepalm:: Some of them so (apparently) obvious that I would be like, why didn't anyone TELL ME.

[maplemood]

Oh, gosh, yes! I do feel like typos don't tend to always jump out at you, especially on a first read-through. But it's still a nasty surprise to discover them hanging around years later.

[maplemood]

:):) Fandom's been very good to me.

[sunlit_stone]

Oh, that's interesting! I don't know why, but somehow I think my brain had marked you down as having been in fandom forever.

I'm very glad you've found stuff to do, and stories to write, that makes you happy--and, selfishly, that you're around to talk to! :P (And for what it's worth, I've really liked every story of yours that I've read.)

[maplemood]

I think part of it was also because we never had cable when I was growing up, and I didn't really get online until I was a teenager, so I didn't have an awareness of online fandom even being a thing for quite a while. But now that I do I like to think that I've made up for lost time. :)

Thank you so much! I've had the best time talking with you, too--so I'm glad fandom's been around for both of us. And thanks. :) I'm pretty much never satisfied with the finished product, but the more I write the more I come around to the idea that it's the process of the writing that really matters, and as long as I've enjoyed that I'll be happy. I also do think it comes down to having worked on a story for long enough that of course you're going to spot all the mistakes (real or otherwise) that somebody reading it for the first time wouldn't.

[sunlit_stone]

That makes sense! And it definitely looks that way to me :)

Yay :) I'm glad. And thank you, too :) And it's interesting--I'm usually more-or-less satisfied with the finished product--I guess I usually think they're mostly doing what they were supposed to do?--but one of my Yuletide fics this year I banged out in the 22st and 23rd, and then found ambyr as a beta through the Yuletide discord on the 24th, and that one I've gone back to a few times in my head, thinking 'mmm, if only I had more time, I could have added...' and so on. But yeah, I definitely think that overfamiliarity can produce its own problems :P Especially when it comes to foreshadowing or hinting at something--is this too obvious, or is it just that I wrote it and have also read it about 50 times? Etc.

[maplemood]

Foreshadowing is the toughest! Hinting at anything is hard for me--I feel like I tend to have a "go big or go home" attitude and want to spell everything out even when I don't need to. But you don't want to make things too obscure or hard to follow, either. It's definitely a balancing act.