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ed-edward-blackbeard · 5 years ago

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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.

#everything you ever wanted to know about me #but were afraid to ask #fanfic writers meme #askbox meme

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cookinguptales · 8 years ago

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okay, so late ‘90s, early ‘00s badfic 101

A lot of fic was either on fanfiction.net or private archives. People would also post things to fic communities or private journals on LJ. (Which was a whole...thing, with some people friends-locking their work because they were afraid of sporking/flames or they were just pretentious.) ff.net had a whole HOST of problems, like a variety of terrible ways your formatting could get borked (like you couldn’t use repeating characters, which made line breaks hard; that’s why you’d get increasingly “arty” line breaks that could be...cringey), policies against allowing any fic of media created by people who didn’t like fic (see: Anne McCaffery, Anne Rice, other crazy Annes, etc.), puritan anti-smut policies which often got applied to slash fic more than het fic, and just...in general, terrible fic. Private archives were often manually curated by their owners, which could be fine or it could lead to cliques and circlejerks. The Harry Potter archives seemed to get especially crazy with this and some truly epic wanks came out of that. You’d also see people hosting fic on their own sites (usually angelfire or something) with big slash warnings and IF YOU’RE UNDER 18 GET OUT warnings. A lot of fic archives wouldn’t host slash or porn, and you were liable to get in trouble in fandom or otherwise if you didn’t strongly label LGBT/18+ themes. Especially if the fic in question contained both. Like. I don’t like the OTW for many reasons, but I have to admit that AO3 is basically a godsend. We lost a lot of fic to purged LJs/deleted websites.

SUPER purple prose. Older fic in general tended to be a bit more “literary” and purple and it sometimes read like J.R.R. Tolkein was having a stroke. By the time the ‘90s/’00s rolled around, you’d just get this sort of halfway point where people would have generally unornamented text except for things being thrown in like this character’s cerulean/azure/periwinkle eyes. The shade would change by scene, and you’d always know because there’d be a lot of stuff like “the cerulean-eyed man shook his head”. EVERY CHARACTER IN THIS SCENE KNOWS HIS NAME, USE HIS NAME. Or they’d refer to a character’s glimmering green orbs or something. It was painful.

In anime fandom especially, you’d get a lot of these epithets that referred to their abnormal hair colors. People saw “brunette” and were like “shit, I can adapt that” so you get ravenette and bluenette and silverette and pinkette and kill me now. Some people got pissy about like -et/-ette endings re: gender, but after you’ve gone to the bluenette place, it doesn’t even fucking matter anymore. Grammar is dead.

Anime fic also tended to have a lot of so-called “fangirl Japanese”. Writers would just sprinkle in any Japanese words they knew for no goddamn reason, which would usually end in glossaries at the end like *kakkoi means cool! *aoi means blue! and goddamn guys, these are all words than have legit English translations.

Script fic. Just... script fic. More on that at the bottom bc I had to use some special formatting.

“Crack” fic. This would be fic that was purposefully OOC (out of character) for comedic effect. Tended to utilize “omg so random!!” humor. It usually was pretty much only comedic to caffeinated 13-year-olds. This was literally all Invader Zim’s fault and you know I’m right.

The “disposal” of female love interests in slash fic. Used to be much more of a problem than it is now. Now, I’m not talking about fics that just don’t talk about female characters or retcon a relationship or are like “they broke up!!! moving on!” I’m talking about fics that turn all female characters into shrieking homophobic harpies that would probably rather their canon love interests be dead than fuck a dude. This was applied even to like the nicest characters in the world, or even to characters who weren’t in canon romances with the male characters but were deemed to be threats. They often got smacked around or died or whatever. Things were a lot more sexist in fandom back then. There was a yenta trope that kind of arose as backlash to this but was really just as annoying in a different way. That usually involved a canon love interest going full yaoi fangirl (for some reason) and shipping her love interest with another guy, then involving herself in their love lives to a truly creepy extent so she could hook her boyfriend up with another guy. These were also sexist. Both situations tended to make the female characters incredibly OOC and prevented them from having any real human reactions/emotions.

Mary Sues. Now, the term has lost a lot of its effect in recent years. Mary Sues (or Gary Stus) used to have a really specific meaning. They were OCs (original characters) that were the prettiest, smartest, most powerful, popular characters in the whole world that had glittering orbs for eyes and usually had some kind of special magical power that made them better than all the canon characters. These were self-insert characters -- in other words, even if they didn’t have the same name as the author, they were wish-fulfillment characters wherein the character was used as a stand-in for the author, who could then write all the canon characters loving them. Now people just use the term for any female character that’s powerful and central to the plot, so...it’s not a useful word anymore. As for the old school Sues, well... I don’t necessarily think they were bad, but I will say it’s a hell of a lot more fun to write a Suefic than to read one. That really goes for most fanfics with OCs that have been elevated to a prominent status. People generally read fanfic because they want to read about the canon characters they love, not shallowly-written OCs that take over the fic. I don’t think OC-driven fic is bad to write... But again, yeah, it’s usually much more fun to write than to read. I think it’s helpful to be cognizant of that.

Reviewer participation fic. Mostly an issue on ff.net. It used to be that there was no way to reply to comments on ff.net, and as I’ve said before, there was a strong comment culture back then. Just not replying to reviews could be interpreted as very rude. (It would be unfathomably rude on LJ, which was more community-driven.) So to get around this, people would include a section to reply to reviewers at the beginning of the next chapter or their next one-shot or whatever. So you’d get long interminably long fics on ff.net with like 40 chapters in which nothing happened, and to get ideas, they’d ask reviewers. Worse, sometimes people would try to incentivize readers to review by offering to put their loyal reviewers in the fic. So you’d have this long section at the top of the chapter which might have a conversation that’s been going on between them and a reviewer for the past 8 chapters (and hell, they might’ve made a new chapter just to reply to them) except multiplied by however many reviewers there are, and then the reviewers worm their way into the fics, too! Oh my god.

Passive-aggressive fic. This was especially an issue on LJ as a personal response, but would show up on ff.net as response to wider fandom tropes. These would be fics where a character is like “WOW I WOULD NEVER DO X, THAT WOULD BE SOMETHING I’D NEVER EVEN CONSIDER DOING. WHAT KIND OF IDIOT WOULD THINK I’D DO THAT?” And X is usually (a.) something a reviewer told them would be more IC than what was in their previous fic, (b.) something another writer just put in their fic, or (c.) a ship they don’t like. (This would also extend to fics where characters would be like I’M NOT GAY, I’D NEVER FUCK A DUDE, EWWW!! as anti-slasher rhetoric.) Back then, you could reasonably expect that people in your fandom would at least see, if not read, your new fic. On LJ, you saw basically all the fics because they were posted in wider communities, and fandom was, as a whole, more community-driven back then. If you insulted another member of the community via fic, they’d know in about ten minutes. It was throwing down a gauntlet. lol

The crack fic genre also extended to crack pairings. It wasn’t unusual for people to dare each other to write weird pairings (often characters who’d never met), the more bizarre the better. This was the era of Hogwarts/Lake Squid. These fics were often sporked, but in a more delighted way than usual. There really was more of a sense that people could and would write anything. Some people came to actually ship these pairings like legit and ship wars would ensue. And sometimes some cracky pairings just became really popular for assorted reasons and that made other fans really mad. This still happens, honestly.

Ship wars now are often dressed up in social justice terms, which is a trend that I find frustrating bc I feel like it denigrates important issues. Ship wars in the ‘90s/’00s, on the other hand, were just balls to the wall insane. I still refuse to engage in ship wars because damn, man, the shit I’ve seen. People were much more open about the fact that they hated people who shipped other pairings because they just shipped something else or were squicked by the pairing or whatever. The Harry Potter shipwars got particularly fucking weird. So it wasn’t generally a slash vs. het thing, like some people will have you think. Some of the worst ship wars I have ever seen were het shippers at war. Never again the harmonian times.

Frankly a lot of other things that my mind is rebelling against remembering.

Script fic (often with author interludes) was eventually banned from FF.net, which kind of killed it in fic because that was the main posting venue back then (unless you wrote slash or porn, which could be taken off if people reported it; technically slash wasn’t against the rules unless it was explicit, but they didn’t often check the reports carefully). What I mean by script fic is like

Karamatsu: wow I sure like these sparkly pants Chibita: I don’t (A/N: I do!!!!111 I have a pair like them at home!) Karamatsu: let’s fuck now Chibita: but offscreen because we want to preserve our soft M rating!

The A/Ns (author’s notes) could get really in-depth sometimes, with an author often RPing the characters OOC or using them as their “muses”. So sometimes you’d get a mess like

Karamatsu: gosh it sure does suck that everyone treats me like dog shit Chibita: true (A/N: serenaxkittyx755: That’s not true, Karaboy! Choromatsu: Yeah, we like you less than dog shit. Ichimatsu: Way less.)

Except my example was honestly more IC than most of these tended to be. You’d often get “muses” saying “ewww” or “that’s hot” during romance scenes, even when this made no sense whatsover. Or offering commentary on some random non-karamatsu character’s fashion choices or something. Purposeful “crack” was considered not just okay but in fact desirable back then.

basically, badfic was hell.

#replies #file all this under shit I don't miss

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