#onelisting

[angsty-aliens]

Webrings. I found it on webrings because Google wasn’t a thing yet. 😭

Poll Tuesday

I feel like I’m exposing myself a little bit with this bc my introduction to fic is soo random I think, but whatever your answer please tell me the story! I wanna know haha

[olderthannetfic]

As one of your younger followers I’m surprised that blogs are. . . New? Newer than I thought at least. I guess I always misunderstood what Web 1.0 really was (I grew up web Web 2.0) and I always thought that, outside of informational topics, a big feature of Web 1.0 would be people talking about their lives and interests — tho granted with little to no communication/replies from others. Huh, TIL.

--

Yeah, things really changed a lot and perhaps even more quickly than now at some points in the internet's development.

At the start of the 90s, it was all Usenet groups and service providers with their own forums you could only see if you had that service.

Free e-mail addresses became a thing in the mid 90s. Prior to that, it was all paid stuff like AOL, and prior to that, it was your university or IT job e-mail with your actual name in it. There were very few services, paid or otherwise, that provided you with an e-mail and access to the internet generally: it was all about selling access to a given company's proprietary hangout. There were some. My e-mail is from one. But that wasn't the norm.

(And, of course, prior to like 1995, "the internet" did not by default mean the web. Now, everything is the web or a web interface for your e-mail or something.)

When eGroups and Onelist and then Yahoo Groups arrived, it really changed things for fandom because you could run your own mailing list without knowing technical things. Some of the action drained away from Usenet to mailing lists.

Fandom dipped its toes into blogging sites immediately, but the giant wave of people getting Livejournals wasn't until 2003. I had one in 2002 through a friend, and it really wasn't this big fandom thing at the time. Some time around 2002/early '03, fans started trying to round up invite codes and get their favorite writers on there, and then LJ dropped the need to pay or have a code, and the flood away from mailing lists began.

(I guess web-based forums go in here somewhere, but I wasn't as active on them.)

In some ways, Discord is more like fandom on the early internet than either the LJ era or Tumblr eras were/are.

Most of the 90s stuff was more topic-specific. People socialized because people are people and frequently off-topic, but you were hanging out in The Place For Anime Fanfic or something, not so-and-so's personal diary with a comments section.

[anakinsafterlife]

OK, sorry, I take back the thing about being mad about the Legend of Drizzt. I was mad, but mostly got over it.

To put this in context, I basically *founded* this fandom back around 1995, and I had to pester people who had never even *read* the books to write fanfic for it (that works when you're a tactless child). I started the original OneList community for it after shaking up enough interest on fucking AOL message boards in the mid-90s. For a time, I was literally the only person alive posting fic about my fav character. And now there is fic and art all over the place. My fav character is a cult fav in a niche fandom and there's so much art and fic for him now. It makes me weep, but I was also a bit mad because the character has been killed off, ressurected, flanderized, then given a stupid ghost scene, then resurrected again ( somewhat de-flanderized), in a way that I only somewhat liked and under circumstances that seemed suspiciously like the author was reading our old fanfic.

Anyway, I realized that my discomfort was at least somewhat "I liked this band before it was cool," so I'm trying to get over it and just enjoy the fanworks.

[alittledizzy]

for the ask game: 🍓, 🍄, 🔪, and 🌸 (if you're comfortable doing so)!

🍓 how did you get into writing fanfiction?  i was writing stories about the kids of the characters on my favorite tv show (star trek the next generation) when i was in like... second grade. by fifth grade i was making up stories about the teachers i saw flirting with each other. but i started writing official fic at about twelve and i discovered a JAG mailing list on OneList!

🍄share a head canon for one of your favourite ships or pairings i feel like george being autistic is too obvious of one. but i'm still gonna say it.

🔪what's the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project? at one point at the height of my writing for glee fandom i could have told you basically anything about the UMICH campus and especially the living accomodations around it. to the point where i had people that were UMICH students that would message me and be like wait did you go there too?

🌸do you have any pets? if you do, post some pictures of them i will always post pics of my pets. ninja (in the first pic) is my 17 year old cat and i've had her since i was in college. pi is a ten-ish year old cat i took in as a stray when he camped himself out on my porch as a kitten.

[arcanetrivia]

Re your tags, wolfkitten, yes eGroups existed and was one of the services eaten by Yahoo Groups (another being Onelist).

I was on Usenet and local BBSes and CompuServe, but I don't think of any of these things as "social media". And LiveJournal, which is what I picked, I don't think was/is the same kind of beast as Facebook or Twitter, either.

[mneiai]

Okay, also?

AO3 didn't invent content warnings or start getting people to use them lol that's so revisionist. Not only were there onelists/egroups I had been in with extensive warning requirements in like 1999, but around the time AO3 started there was a big push for the warnings.

Here's a post from MY PERSONAL FIC LJ that therefore wasn't even really publicly disseminated from 2006:

Here's the same fic on FFnet that I promise you I didn't bother editing lol

Here's another from 2009 before the open beta in what had already become the more formalized standard format one would see on LJ:

Fic does not have warnings because of AO3, AO3 has warnings because fandom already had them. Mailing lists and LJ comms had various warning related requirements.

[thehomegirlne]

Welcome to my new place! .. #thehomegirlne #FollowtheONE #OpeningDoors #TogetherAsONE #WhatsNext #CoolCulture #WowNow #GiveONEBack #HelloTomorrow #UNbrokerage #UNtraditional #FREEdom #OpeningDoors #ONECares #ONEVoice #Coolture #YouWinAtONE #WakeUpToWin #ONElisting #RealtyONEGroup #MyWowNow #UNstoppable #ONEFamily (at Realty ONE Group Sterling) https://www.instagram.com/p/BvSZOUdgo4_/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1cuqqqrw7fxyr

[sineala]

How would you say fandom culture has changed over the years? What are some differences you notice between older and younger fandom folks?

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to answer this, and I’m not sure I have a really good answer, but I’m going to try.

I’ve been in fandom since approximately 1995. Maybe 1994. At that point, the world wide web was a relatively new part of the internet, and the fandoms I was in had most of their activity on privately-hosted mailing lists (predating eGroups/OneList/Yahoo Groups) and on Usenet newsgroups, with fiction beginning to be available on websites as part of either fandom-specific or pairing-specific archives as well as authors’ individual pages. Fanfiction.net did not yet exist. LiveJournal did not exist. AO3 definitely did not exist. If you wanted real-time chat, there was IRC. I was coming in basically at the tail end of zine fandom; zines were no longer the only way of distributing fanfiction, as fandom started to move online. So I have a selection of zines from 90s-era Western media fandoms but even by then zines weren’t where I was doing most of my reading.

I think in terms of generally “what it was like to be in fandom,” the big-picture stuff hasn’t changed. Fandom still produces creative fanwork and likes to, y’know, get together and talk about fandom. Also, almost every fight or complaint that fandom has about something is a thing that has been going on for actual years. People complain that, say, the kudos button is ruining comment culture because back in the LJ days the only way you could comment on a story was, well, by leaving an actual comment, or sending an email on a mailing list, and this might mean that people who would have otherwise commented have left a kudos instead. But back in the LJ and mailing list days, people were complaining that commenting was going downhill since the days of zines, when in order to comment on a story you had to write a real paper letter and mail it and because you had to do that, the quality of feedback was so much better than you got nowadays because people could just dash off a quick email or comment. You get the idea. Top/bottom wars are not new either. Pairing wars are not new. If you’ve been in fandom a while, you will pretty much have seen all the fights already. I think one thing that is new, though, is the fandom awareness of things like privilege and intersectionality and various -isms, as well as things like “providing warnings might be nice” (do you know how much unwarned deathfic I have read? a lot!) and I sure won’t say we’re perfect at any of this now, but I think fandom is trying way way more about all that stuff than it used to.

There are some fights we actually don’t have anymore, as far as I can tell. I feel like it’s been years since I’ve seen the “real person fiction is wrong” battle, but also I don’t hang out in a whole lot of RPF fandoms, so it’s possible that’s still going and I just don’t see it.

There also used to be a recurring debate about whether gay relationships that were canonical were slash or not. When slash started, obviously this wasn’t a question because there weren’t canonical gay relationships in fandoms, period. But as gay characters began to appear in media, people started to wonder “does slash mean all same-sex relationships, or does slash mean only non-canonical same-sex relationships?” Now, you may be reading this and think that sounds like an incredibly weird thing to get hung up on, but that’s because what appears to have happened is that the term “ship” (originally from X-Files Mulder/Scully fandom) has, as far as I can tell, come up and eaten most of the rest of the terminology. Now people will just say, “oh, I ship that.” For any pairing, gay or not, canonical or not. Fandom seems to have decided that for the most part it no longer actually needs a term specific to same-sex relationships as a genre.

Similarly, there are a few genres of fic that we used to have also pretty much don’t exist anymore. There are also plenty of genres that are well-entrenched now that are also extremely recent -- A/B/O comes to mind. But there are some kinds of fic we don’t write a lot of now. Like, I haven’t seen smarm in years! I also haven’t seen We’re Not Gay We Just Love Each Other in a while. There was also a particular style of slash writing where you’d basically have to explain, in detail, what made you think that these particular characters could be anything other than straight. You’d have to motivate this decision. You’d have to look at their canonical heterosexual relationships and come up with a way to explain why all those had happened in order to reconcile how this one guy could have romantic feelings for another guy. When had he figured out he wasn’t straight? Who might he have been with before? How does he interact with people in ways that make you think he’s not straight? That kind of thing. You had to, essentially, show your work. And these days a lot of fanfic is just like, “Okay, Captain America is bisexual, let’s go!” It’s... different.

Fandom also used to skew older, is my sense. A lot older. I don’t know, actually, if it really was older, but I get the sense now that there are some younger people who are surprised that adults are still in fandom. I have seen people saying these days that they think they’re too old for fanfiction because they are not in middle school anymore. And I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the barriers to access fandom are a lot lower than they used to be. You used to basically have to be an adult with disposable income (or know an adult with disposable income who was willing to help you out; but even then if you were reading explicit fiction you also had to swear you were 18+, usually by sending in an age statement to whoever you were buying the zine from or to the mods of the list you wanted to join, so a lot of fandom was very much age-gated). Internet access was not widely available. Even if you had internet access, you maybe didn’t have your own email address, so you couldn’t sign up for mailing lists; free email providers didn’t exist. If you wanted to buy zines, you had to have money to buy them. If you wanted to go to cons, you had to be able to afford the cost of the con, travel to the con, et cetera. If you wanted to have a website you had to know HTML. Social media did not exist. You want to draw art? Guess what, you’re probably drawing it on paper! You might be able to upload a picture to your website if you have a digital camera or a scanner, but both of those things are expensive, and also a lot of people don’t have the capability or the money to download pictures from the internet (some people have data caps with overage charges, and some people have text-only connections!), so they won’t get to see it. Maybe you can sell your piece at a con! You want to make a fanvid? We called them songvids, but, anyway, you know how you’re doing that? You’re going to hook two VCRs together and smash the play and record buttons very fast! If you want anyone else to watch them, you are either making them a tape personally and mailing it to them or bringing your vids to a convention. Maybe you can digitize them and upload them, but it’s going to take people hours to download them!

(Every three hours my ISP would kick me off the internet and I’d have to dial in again. If it was a busy time of day, it might take me 20 or 30 minutes to get a connection again. And that was assuming no one else in the house needed to use the phone line. Imagine if your modem went out every three hours now.)

And now, for the cost of my internet connection, I can read pretty much whatever fanfiction I want, whenever I want it. I can see all the fanart I want! I can watch vids! Podfic exists now! Fanmixes exist! Gifsets and moodboards exist! If I want to write fic I can write it with programs that are completely free, and as soon as I post it everyone in the entire world can read it. If I want to draw or make vids that may require some additional investment, but I may also be able to do it with things I already have. Do you have any idea how good we all have it?

There are a couple of kinds of fan activity that don’t seem to exist anymore, though, and I miss them. I know that roleplaying still goes on, but I feel like these days most people who do real-time text roleplay have switched to things like Discord. I know that in the LJ days, RP communities were popular. But I really miss MU*s (MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, MUXes..), which were servers for real-time text-based RP with a bunch of... hmm... features to aid RP. There were virtual rooms with text descriptions, and objects in virtual rooms with descriptions, and your character had a description, and they could interact with the objects as well as with other characters, and you could program things to change descriptions or emit various kinds of text or take you to different rooms, and so on. Just to, y’know, enhance the atmosphere. It was fun and it was where I learned to RP and I’m sad they’re pretty much gone now.

I also don’t think I see a lot of fanfiction awards in fandoms. Wonder where they went.

Going back to the previous point, the barriers to actually consuming the canon you are fannish about are way, way, way lower now. You can pretty much take it for granted that if right now someone tells you about a shiny new fandom, there will be a way to read that book or watch that show or movie right now. Possibly for free! Of course you can watch it! Why wouldn’t you be able to?

This was absolutely, absolutely not the case before. I’m currently in Marvel Comics fandom. If there is a comic I want to read, I can read it right now on the internet. I have subscribed to Marvel Unlimited and I can read pretty much every comic that is older than three months old; the newer ones cost extra money. But I can do it all from the comfort of my own home right now. I was also, actually, in Marvel Comics fandom in the nineties. If I wanted to read a comic, I had to go to a comic book store and hope they had it in stock; if they didn’t, I had to try another store. Not a lot of comics were available in trade paperback and they definitely weren’t readable on the internet. I used to read a lot of Gambit h/c fic set after Uncanny X-Men #350. I never found a copy of UXM #350. I still haven’t! But I did eventually read it on Unlimited.

Being in TV show fandoms also had similar challenges. Was the show you were watching still on the air? No? Then you’d better hope you could find it in reruns, or know someone who had tapes of it that they could copy for you, otherwise you weren’t watching that show. It was, I think, pretty common for people to be in fandoms for shows they hadn’t seen, because they had no way to see the show, but they loved all the fanfic. The Sentinel had a whole lot of fans like that, both because I think it took a while for it to end up in reruns and because overseas distribution was probably poor. So you’d get people who read the fic and wrote fic based on the other fic they’d read, which meant that you got massive, massive amounts of fanon appearing that people just assumed was in the show because it was a weirdly specific detail that appeared in someone’s fic once. Like “Jim and Blair’s apartment has a small water heater” (not actually canonical) or “Blair is a vegetarian” (there’s an episode where his mother visits and IIRC cooks him one of his favorite meals, which is beef tongue).

Like, I was in The Professionals fandom for years. I read all the fic. I hadn’t seen the show. As far as I know, it never aired in the US, and it certainly never had any kind of US VHS or DVD release. I’d seen a couple songvids. I eventually saw a couple episodes in maybe 2003, and that was because my dad special-ordered a commercial VHS tape from the UK and paid someone to convert it from PAL to NTSC. I didn’t get to see the whole show until several years later when I got a region-free DVD player someone in fandom sent me burned copies of the UK DVD releases and then I special-ordered the commercial release of the DVDs from the UK myself. But if I were a new fan and wanted to watch Pros right now? It is on YouTube! For free!

I think also one of the things about fandom that’s not immediately evident to new fans is the way in which it is permanent and/or impermanent. There are probably people whose first fannish experience is on Tumblr or who only read fanfic on FFN and who have no idea what they would do if either site, say, just shut down. But if you’ve been in fandom a while, you’ve been through, say, Discord, Tumblr, Twitter, Pillowfort, Imzy, DW, JournalFen, LJ, GeoCities, IRC, mailing lists. And sure, if Tumblr closed, it would be inconvenient. But fandom would pack up and move somewhere else. You would find it again. It would, eventually, be okay. Similarly, if you’ve been in a lot of fandoms, if you’ve made a lot of friends, drifting through fandoms is like that. You’ll make a friend in 1998 because you were in the same fandom, and then you might go your own ways, and ten years later you might be in another fandom with them again! It happens.

But the flip side of that is that I think a lot of older fans have learned not to trust in the permanence of any particular site. If you like a story, you save it as soon as you read it. If you like a piece of art, you save it. If you like a vid, you save it. Because you don’t know when the site it’s on will be gone for good. I have, like, twenty years of lovingly-curated fanfic. And I feel like people who have only been in fandom since AO3 existed might not understand how much AO3 is a game-changer compared to what we had before. It’s a site where you can put your fic up and you don’t have to worry that the webhost is going out of business, or that the site might delete your work because they don’t allow gay fiction or explicit fiction or fiction written in second person or fiction for fandoms where the creator doesn’t like fanfiction, or whatever. Because all of those things have absolutely happened. But, I mean, I still save pretty much everything I like, even on AO3, just in case.

So, basically, yeah, fandom is a whole lot more accessible than it used to be. I think fandom is pretty much still fandom, but it’s a lot easier to get into, and that has made it way more open to people who wouldn’t have been able to be in fandom before. There is so, so much more now than there ever was before, and I think that’s great.

[littlecrazyhelmacron]

Hork-Bajir-Controller

Trust me to forget a picture because of how long ago I drew it.

Hork-Bajir-Controller with a Dracon rifle. This is actually one of my oldest (might even be the oldest) of my OCs, Sahaliyan 308. If anyone used to hang around the old Animorphs roleplaying Yahoo!Clubs/ONElist/egroups around 1999/2000, you may have met this guy under a couple of names. Got brought in when villains were needed.

[zekedms]

Sometimes I romanticize the old internet and think about how Facebook and Twitter ruined so much and still do, and how MySpace fucked so many things up.

Other times I remember old pagan drama around webrings and onelist and the absolute absurd levels of “OMG FLUFFY BUNNIES ARE THE WORST”, everyone trying to prove their Certified Pagan Levels, and pretentious Thelemites simply avoided any actual discussion by listing off every book they’d read in their entire lives in lieu of evidence.

These things often happened simultaneously.

[olderthannetfic]

I am supremely curious as to what was the most interesting older than net fiction that you've ever seen circulated?

Or maybe just what was your favorite?

also was the star trek penis cosplay a story you shared or was that someone else?

and when did you first become aware of fanfiction on the internet? Was it just email sharing or was there a website that you and some fandom friends set out to use?

--

Yes, I mentioned the dancing penises, though I think I was wrong about Kandy dancing. I think she did the tape recorder. (It was a skit they did at cons. The penises danced to music.)

I discovered fanfic via alt.tv.x-files in 1994. I was there because I'd gotten into the show, but it introduced me to a lot of geek culture things in addition to having canon discussion.

The World Wide Web had existed since 1991, but there wasn't much on it. It exploded in 1995 specifically. I downloaded the whole x-files archive (pre-gossamer) via FTP, like one did back in the day, not via a site at all.

It was not e-mail sharing because this was an era when few people had e-mail and those that did had it through work and school with their real names on it. There were some paid services where you could have whatever name you wanted, but there weren't free things like hotmail where you could make endless throwaway fannish accounts, and much worse, mailing lists were generally being hosted on university servers and run by somebody working tech at a university. Free mailing list hosts started with egroups and onelist a couple of years after I got into fandom, then got gobbled up by Yahoo Groups.

I was certainly on hundreds of mailing lists within just a few years, but when I started, it was a usenet-heavy era. Lists, particularly lists where anything queer would be discussed, were secret and invite-only like Virgule and would not have allowed someone under 18 to join. (Usenet, meanwhile, had soc.bi right out in the open I read that a lot in addition to fandom groups.)

The most interesting old fic that springs to mind is probably one where the mysterious boss from Miami Vice (my icon on tumblr, in fact) had no known past because he'd come from those underground people in the Beauty and the Beast tv series with Ron Perlman in lion makeup and Linda Hamilton as a NYC lawyer.

[strangesequitur]

eGroups. Actually, it was Usenet via the AOL message boards interface. But the stories themselves were generally self-hosted on websites with AMAZINGLY complex frame layouts.

[1000-directions]

13, 15, 27 for the writer asks

13. When did you start writing fanfic? 

ohhhh boy. okay lol. this doesn’t really count, but when i was in kindergarten, i would have elaborate self-insert daydreams about hanging out with the teenage mutant ninja turtles and i don’t think we were even fighting crimes, i’m pretty sure they were just all in love with me, so rest assured your girl has been a monsterfucker since day one lollllllll. and then when i was either thirteen or fourteen, i wrote two self-insert FRIENDS scripts by hand in a spiral bound notebook, never shared them with anyone, had no concept that that was fanfic. i always had a lot of weird writing projects going at that age, and that was just another one. and then when i was fifteen, i started formally writing stories about bands and putting them on mailing lists and soon after on my own tripod website (this was 1999 okay y’all i was on like onelist and egroups before they even became yahoo groups omg just typing that made me feel old). so anyway i usually use 1999 as my official start date for fanfic writing holy shit

15. What is the fanfic you’ve written that you’re most proud of? 

hmm this is hard. it might be save your first and last chance for me, which has a lot of careful character work, like i put a lot of specific thought into who clint and bucky were instead of just relying on my intuitive understanding of them. also, sorry not sorry, but the one where clint fell into a pond. it’s real filthy, and there’s no plot so to speak, but i think it’s structured really well and has a sense of progression and movement, and i think it’s a well-excuted pwp, like i wouldn’t change a single word of it.

27. What time of day do you prefer to write?

definitely morning or early afternoon, and i think that’s part of why i’ve been struggling so much this year, because i’m sleeping in a lot more than i used to because there’s nowhere to go. not being able to spend my sunday mornings in a coffeeshop with my laptop has really disrupted my writing schedule.

fanfic writer asks

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Yahoo Groups archivists despair as Verizon blocks their preservation efforts ahead of shutdown

Since 2010, Nightowl, the "head of the Yahoo Users Crusade," has been leading a preservation effort to scrape and archive the sprawling contents of Yahoo Groups. She writes, "Now we are desperate. We are running out of time to ever save our precious content. Yahoo has never made it easy to rescue it, and has in fact, recently made it increasingly harder and harder. There is no easy way to rescue and save our content."

One site, groupsio, who is run by Mark Fletcher, creator of the original Onelist, is able to do it, but it costs users money, and even if he's paid, he'll never have enough time to rescue everyone's content before Dec 14.

Now we are at a place where it's now or never. We need someone to help us get our plight out to the public, so Verizon and Yahoo will know we are STILL HERE.

Help! They’re about to obliterate us! [Nightowl/Mods and Members Blog]

https://boingboing.net/2019/10/20/save-yahoo-groups.html

[aenariasbookshelf]

Gather ‘round, my darlings, and let vodka auntie Aenaria tell you tales of fandom of old.

I finally got my TV stand built today and began unpacking my DVDs (because I am old and have not had cable for a good decade now - I have a lot of DVDs as a result of that), and I ran across this vintage gem.

And when I say vintage, I’m not exaggerating.  I got this DVD set, season 1 of the X-Files, as a high school graduation present.  I graduated from high school in 2000.

I told you I was old.

Now, if memory serves me correctly, this box set up here was one of the first TV shows overall to come out on DVD.  Before this, I had a handful of tapes with a few select first season episodes of the show - and those were mass market tapes.  They actually sold them in sets of...maybe 4 episodes a piece?  I’m tossing my mind back even further here, so it’s a little blurry.

But god, to my 18 year old obsessive fan self, this was a revelation.  Every single episode of a season was at my fingertips, without having to worry about commercials, or a dodgy copy of a video tape that got passed along to you from someone else on that mailing list that was one of the main sources of your fandom experience (RIP Yahoo Groups...at least they eventually became Yahoo Groups.  Was it OneList before?  I really can’t remember), or even just seeing a select handful of episodes because that was all that was available to rent/buy because you missed the rerun of that episode and didn’t get a chance to tape it.

As DVDs go, this is definitely a relic.  I think there’s only 3 or 4 episodes per disk, and the episodes don’t automatically click over to the next one - you have to grab the remote and hit play again.  Binge watching was obviously not considered by the designers of this set.

All this to say is that I love fandom, and watching it change and grow throughout the years has been a hell of a ride, and I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

[ed-edward-blackbeard]

Fanfic Author Meme.  Keep Reading after question 2 for 3-50.

1. What was your first fic and could you stand to reread it today?

Jesus Lord, no.  I’d die of secondhand embarrassment before I got halfway through it.  It was never published online, thank Christ.  It was called … ugh, I don’t remember what I called it, but it was a line from Edmund Spenser.  (Don’t judge.)  It was an OC female character and Autolycus, from Hercules and Xena, played by Bruce Campbell.  It was… a SHAMBLES.  Self-insert, wish-fulfillment of the worst kind.  But, my friend Alicia read it at the time and she told me how great she thought it was, and I should keep at it.  So, thank you, Edmund-Spenser-titled-fic.

2. What’s your most recent fic and how far do you think you’ve come?

It’s called “i commit sins every day but i never give my soul away”, and it’s on my AO3 at https://archiveofourown.org/works/22951009.  And I actually don’t have a unit of measurement for how much I’ve improved.  But it’s also been… God, I’m 43 today,  so it’s been 27 years I’ve been writing.  Almost thirty years.  Shit, I’m old.

3. In your opinion, what’s your best fic?

Oh, man.  Tricky question.  If by best you mean technically written, most enjoyable?  I’d say maybe wasting the dawn.  Definitely By Inches We Fall.  But to be totally honest with you?  I think my best fic, the one that got me, personally by the throat, shook me, and hasn’t let me go?  Shoah.  It’s one of my earlier fics, from the Sentinel fandom, but man.  Writing this was rough.  I did my research on concentration camps, and I couldn’t sleep right for weeks.  Lisa and Patt were holding my hands over AIM practically every night when I was sobbing that I couldn’t finish it, that I couldn’t do it, that it was too much.  (I’d have been about fucking seventeen, maybe nineteen, when I was writing it.)  I bit off way more than I was prepared for, but I didn’t quit.  And I’m proud, quite frankly, that I even finished the damn thing, but even this far removed from it, I still feel that gut-punch when I go back re-read it, which is why I don’t.  And haven’t for a couple of years.  

4. In your opinion and without looking at any numbers, what’s your most popular fic?

It’d probably be Consortio.

5. Is there any fic that makes you super happy to reread and remember you wrote that?

I actually feel that way about 99% of my stuff.  Even some of the older stuff, I re-read it and I get really happy because not only do I see myself changing and maturing, I realize I was harder on myself than I should have been.  I didn’t suck like I thought, and I get the warm fuzzies.

6. Is there any fic that makes you super embarrassed to reread and remember you wrote that?

Er, not really?  I mean, there’s some cringey shit I wrote when I was like, twelve, but not even I know where those notebooks got off to.

7. What’s the fic you most want to continue (unfinished or no)?

By Inches We Fall.  It’s my only Game of Thrones fic, and I feel like I really want to continue the story of Jamie and Brienne and their kids, and of Jaime being Hand to King Jon and Queen Sansa.

8. What’s the oldest (longest since last update) fic you most want to continue (unfinished or no)?

How Firm A Foundation.  It’s a Deadwood fic, and I (many years ago, when Deadwood was actually on the air) actually sketched out how every chapter would go.  There’s a few things I’d change today, if I started it again, just because I can plot better than I could ten years ago, but I think the thread of the story is gone forever.

9. Have you ever written for a fandom without watching/reading/playing the source material?

Yami No Matsuei.  A friend of mine was actually heavily into YnM, and I wrote several stories for her.  Later I’ve watched some of it, and I realize I did okay on my characterizations, but there’s always things I could have done better.

10. Have you ever written for a fandom without reading other fanfic for it?

Pretty much every fandom I have ever been in.  I don’t read a lot of fanfic, because I’m afraid (almost paranoid, in fact) that I’ll internalize something I’ve read and later spout it out in my fic, and I don’t ever want to copy anyone, deliberately or otherwise.

11. Have you ever written a fic for a concept you know someone else has done before? How did it impact your writing process or feelings after posting?

I have, and I didn’t publish it for the reason above; I didn’t feel like my take on it was original enough to bother.

12. Have you ever written a fic and decided never to publish it? Why?

Lots of reasons, actually.  Sometimes I write with the intention of not publishing, it’s something just for me.  I’ve also written a few fics that I ended up absolutely hating, and they’ve never seen the light of day.  I’ve also done some that I felt wasn’t original enough, or they were written about the trope du jour, and I had nothing else to offer that ten other people hadn’t already done.

13. What’s the biggest change between your style when you started in fandom and today?

Sentence style and structure.  I used to do the whole, “He said.”  “In reply, she said.”  “The sky was blue when he rode in.”  And then a few of my better friends (and betas) took me in hand and showed me how to mix it up, chop my comma addiction in half (seriously, I once had a single sentence run on for twelve lines.) and I feel like I get a better grip on characterization.

14. What’s the biggest change in your taste between when you started in fandom and today?

Sex.  I used to write it in everything.  And then the more I wrote, and the older I got, the less I wanted to write it (or read it, or talk about it.)  So I’m a lot more comfortable writing non-sex stories than I used to be.

15. Have you ever purposefully written one fandom/fic idea over another because you knew it’d be more popular?

Of course.  I think everyone has, at one point or another.

16. Have you ever stopped writing a fic/for a fandom because it wasn’t receiving enough attention?

Anything I’ve ever abandoned was lack of my own attention, not anything else.  I’m kinda used to not getting a lot of attention.

17. In your opinion, what’s your most overrated fic?

What He Wants.  It’s pretentious wankfic, for a pairing I don’t actually like all that much (Lucius/Harry), and I just feel like everyone loves it way more than it deserves.

18. What’s your most underrated fic?

I’m gonna pick on Shoah again, because I feel like it just doesn’t get enough love.  I’m biased, because of how emotionally attached I am to the fic, but I feel like it’s ignored.

19. If you had to pick one fic/scene/chapter of your work to describe your entire portfolio to a stranger, which would you pick?

Wasting The Dawn.  It’s a Magicians fic, and it showcases every character from the show, and I think I did a passable job of hitting every voice.  So I’d be proud to show that one around.

20. Have/Would you ever rewrite a fic? If yes, would you take the original down?

Would I rewrite it?  Sure.  Would I take down the original?  Um, that’s a little more difficult.  On the one hand, I’m not really ashamed, as such, of anything that I did.  But having two copies of things would get really complicated and onerous.  I might actually start a second pseud, like maybe kelex-originals or something like that, and move the originals over to that, and leave the rewrites on my main, with a link to the original in the notes.  Yeah, that’s probably what I’d do.

21. If someone starts kudosing and commenting your fics in a spree and has a few works of their own, would you go look through theirs?

HELL YES.  Mostly because I’m always looking for shinies to read in fandoms I don’t write for.  I also kind of like to read their stuff and get a feel for who they are and why they like what I’ve got.  But mostly, I just love it and it makes me giggle watching someone go through my fics and like EEEE THERE YOU ARE AGAIN.

22. Has there ever been anyone who’s made you freak out because they read your work and followed/favorited/reviewed?

Fucking scads of people, actually.

23. What’s the nicest review you’ve ever gotten?

Oh man, I’ve got a fuckton of good ones.  But the one that I always get a kick out of is on one of my Gotham fics, and the comment was along the lines of, the tag mentioned bed-sharing and they thought that was all it was going to be, but it was so much more and they got caught up in it and it was wonderful.  And that’s my favorite (if not the nicest) because I love the fact that I was able to give someone something they enjoyed, even more because it was unexpected!

24. What’s the meanest review you’ve ever gotten? Do you think the reviewer intended it?

It was a review back in the days of OneList, and I was told that my pencils should be broken and my keyboard taken away because I was a terrible writer.  And yes, I know they meant it.

25. What constructive criticism, however well-meaning, always makes you feel bad when you see it in a review?

It’s less a concrit and more a crit.  But it’s always, “why did you do X?  It was out of character!” and that makes me grit my teeth.  Mostly because I feel like I’ve always explained, thoroughly, why I’ve done something (whether in dialog, in the writing itself, or heavily implied in monologues), and that question always makes me want to throttle someone because either they didn’t get it, or I didn’t.  

26. What aspect of your writing do you most enjoy to see praised?

Humor.  I’m a sarcastic bitch, and when it’s appropriate (and sometimes when it isn’t), I have funny characters or have characters deadpan things.  And it delights the fuck out of me when someone highlights that as one of their favorite parts.

27. If you could only ever write crossovers or single-fandom fics ever again, which would you pick?

Single fandom fics.  I’m not a fan of crossovers, though I’ve written them from time to time, and probably will again if I think it’s appropriate.  I just prefer not to cross the streams, as it were.

28. if you could only ever write for a single crossover or a single fandom again, which would you pick?

Good Omens.  Hands down.  So. Many. AUs.  So many ideas.  So many delightful characters.

29. Does the division of your writing across fandoms line up with your reading? What’s the biggest discrepancy?

It does not.  I read far, far less than I actually write.

30. Do you continue to write for a fandom after you’ve moved on or do you focus solely on the new one?

I usually focus on the new one, however, I’ve occasionally re-visited a fandom after I’ve left it, because inspiration hits me, or I’ve gotten back into it.

31. Who’s the one character you’ve just never managed to get perfectly right?

Margo Hanson, from the Magicians.

32. Who’s the one character who shines without you even trying?

There’s a few.  Eliot Waugh, Lex Luthor, Jack O’Neill, the Doctor (9 & 10 mostly)

33. Is there any particular character whose scenes always wind up being longer/more frequent than you expected? Does the quality hold up?

Not really?  Characters and scenes are as long as they need to be.  I do think the quality holds up, though, because honestly, by the time they’re done, I’m done.

34. Was there any fic that you wrote that really surprised you in the fandom reaction? Was it just by the numbers or did they take it an entirely different way?

Not really, or if there was, I don’t remember it.

35. Have you ever written a ship into a fic without meaning to?

Yup.  It snuck in there, especially in the background early on, and by the end I was like, what the fuck, I don’t even ship you, YOU DON’T EVEN GO HERE.

36. Have you ever sincerely written a ship you do not support into a fic?

Nope.  If I don’t like a ship, I don’t write it.

37. Have you ever purposefully bashed a character/ship in a fic?

No.  Not as a writer.  But like, I have written a character saying “I don’t think X belongs with Y, they belong with me!” because that’s pretty much how the actual relationship went down.  (Spike, Buffy, Riley most specifically.)

38. Have you ever purposefully written something you know your readers would find uncomfortable/would not enjoy? If yes, why?

Very, very, very many years ago.  I wrote it just to see if I could.  I could, I did, and I haven’t written it again.

39. Do you consider yourself to have a readership?

No.

40. Do you feel like you put out enough content?

I feel like I put out what I need to.  Is it enough?  idk.

41. If you cross-post your fics on multiple sites, do you have a favorite? Are there certain fics you would only post on certain site?

AO3 is, hands down, my favorite.  For awhile, I was posting to WWOMB (Wonderful World of Make-Believe) but I’ve stopped there, sadly.

42. How many views has your most popular fic gotten?

Consortio is my most popular fic, and it’s gotten 21,658 hits.  Although the fic is multi-chapter, so I don’t know how to break that down into individual hits. In fact, four of my five most popular are multi-chapters.  The only single-chapter fic is What He Wants, clocking in at 6,743. 

43. Your least popular?

The Rose and the Yew Tree, with 0 hits.

44. Do you follow/favorite/kudos/comment/review more stories than you have received?

Unfortunately, no.

45. If you had to call yourself an author of a single genre (besides fanfic) what label would you give yourself?

Pornography.

46. Do you consider yourself a diverse author?

Diverse as in fandoms?  Yes.  Diverse as in style?  Not so much.

47. If someone you know in real life who isn’t involved in fandoms asked to read your work, would you let them? If yes, what would you recommend they read first?

I’ve done that before, and I’ve tailored it to the person and what I know they like.  For example, my old boss got me hooked on La Femme Nikita (the Peta Wilson one), and so when she wanted to read my writing, I gave her my LFN fics to read.

48. Does anyone you know from outside of fandom know you write fanfic? Are they involved in the same fandom too?

Yes, and some of them.

49. Has anyone in your life ever read your fanfic just because you wrote it?

Yes.

50. Has writing fanfic had a significant impact on your life? Would you say it’s entirely positive?

It has had a very significant impact, and no, it hasn’t been at all positive.  Some of my best moments, as well as my worst, are because of fanfic and fandom, but fanfic in particular.  Fic’s brought me close to people, fic’s pushed me away from people, and it’s made people change the way they look at me.