#sorry this took so long Gabolange

[my-little-yellowbird]

I was tagged by @gabolange (months ago!!) to do the one-shot fic writer meme, and why not!                                                        

list your five longest one-shot fics on AO3 (not chaptered works or series) with the word count, fandom, year, and comments/kudos/bookmarks. one-shots are the short stories to fandom’s books and a distinctly different process in my experience.

OK, so here’s the thing.  I’ve written over 120 Call the Midwife fics on My-Little-Yellowbird.com, most of them multi-chapter.. Only 8 are posted on ao3 and 30 or so CtM fics are on ff.net--it’s where I got my start.  I’ve always felt funny cross-posting my fics to different platforms, but that’s silly.  Writers that get paid to write don’t hesitate to promote their own stuff. Why shouldn’t fic writers??  I mean, we do this for FREE.  If a reader sees my stuff they can always scroll past.  the best person to promote your stuff is you. So maybe one day I’ll post them all to both fan sites.

Oh, and aside from a ridiculous there’s-only-one-bed-but-the-floor-is-made-of-lava Blake fic and a silly shout-out to Mary Poppins, it’s all Call the Midwife.

1. Dearest Friend -- 3,252 words, Turnadette, 2014, original publication 2017 on ao3. 32 kudos, 3 comments, 3 bookmarks.  This is an early tale written during the hiatus after s3.  I love eponymous stories, and we all have imaginings of what Patrick wrote to Shelagh during those long months in the sanatorium.  My head canon is built on the idea that both Sister Bernadette and Patrick adhered to a strict honor code.  Patrick would never put Sister Bernadette in the position where she would be asked to renounce her vows.   I will admit to almost having him push the envelope a bit, if you’ll excuse the pun, in a hidden letter.  In the end, I worked very not to say too much, or not enough.

2. His Safety Net -- 2242 words, Turnadette, 2015 - 33 kudos - 6 comments - 3 bookmarks. 2015 original pub, 2017 ao3.  When asked about my favorite fics, this one always comes to mind.  Again, so much of what makes the Shelagh / Patrick relationship work is their ability to say so much with so few words.  I wanted to get that across with physical gestures that speak to their level of emotional intimacy.  I also wanted to deal with the idea of commitment.  They’ve just weathered another storm partly brought about by the fact that while they do communicate, there are still secrets between them.  Has Patrick learned to trust her?  Will he ever?  In the end, it doesn’t matter, because they are bound together by more than romance.

3. How the Brownies Saved Christmas -- 1986 words, Turnadette 11 kudos - 3 comments - 0 bookmarks. 2018,  This one might have been a bit passive aggressive.  The holiday season is ridiculously stressfull for mothers of young kids (I blame Martha Stewart and Pinterest). This is one of my complaints about Shelagh, as well. W never really see HOW SHE DOES IT.  So I gave her helpers. 

4. Losing Her Breath --1,514 words, Sister Bernadette, 2009 (orig pub) - 14 kudos - 3 comments - 0 bookmarks). 2017.  Breathing is a thread through Turnadette (I know that sounds dumb, but bear with me).  TB, polio, smoking are all obviously big ticket items, but many of the most wonderful Turnadette moments have no words.  We just feel them breathe each other.  So I used the idea for this fic, set during the time when they were just starting.  Sister Bernadette is indeed losing her breath, as the TB is already growing within her, just as Patrick takes her breath away.

5. A Moment’s Peace -- 7,464 words, Turnadette 2019, 1 kudos - 18 comments, 1 bookmark. 2019  This was my first “commuter fic,” written onboard the train to Grand Central. My new job was pretty miserable, and the four hours on the train every day were near unbearable.   My betas gently encouraged me to try and redirect my new anxieties into classic Turnadette.  Hence--a coffee shop fic!

Funny thing is, I’m sure there are newer Nonnatuns that are just now learning that I have ever written a fic. I wrote most of my stuff before I went back to work, and all the kids were in school all day. Believe me, I’m trying!

[my-little-yellowbird]

Thanks for your thoughts on this @gabolange.

As I was reading this discourse and the one that inspired it, I had an emotional reaction and had to walk away for a bit. It’s been a tough week for me for outside reasons, and I just didn’t have the bandwidth to process what I was reading. I’m glad I gave myself some time to let this percolate in my head for a bit.

I forgot that Tumblr—or more specifically my Tumblr dash—is not the Call the Midwife fandom. This dash is curated by me alone, and I decided long ago to use it to make me smile and make me think. When I scroll my dash, I see what I have chosen to see. It’s not always what I want to see, or agree with. I came here for the Turnadette (also not the only aspect of this fandom). I follow people that have a thing for the GP and the former nun, but also people that love Trixie and Patsy and even one person who looooves Sister Winifred. The people I follow are entertaining, funny, smart, a bit angry that so many of the issues marginalized people struggle with are no closer to being resolved than they were in 1965. I follow people that don’t always agree with me. I follow people that teach me daily about mental health, sexuality and gender issues, and prejudice in many forms.

I left Facebook years ago because of its toxic culture. I rarely interacted with fandom on that platform, largely because I like to keep my worlds separate (and you should all thank me for protecting you from my twitter!), but I recall others mentioning how ill-informed FB “fans” were, and how some seemed to forget the entire mission of Call the Midwife. Sounds like that’s still the case.

Sometimes we forget that our own experience is not everyone’s experience. When I saw the “CtM fandom” called out for some nasty behavior, what I understood was “Yellowbird’s Tumblr dash” (Conflation, man. It’ll get ya), so I took a step back. Once I removed myself from the center of the universe, things became more clear. I realized that though I was unaware of this behavior, it had happened nonetheless.

This response is not meant to be a “Not all Nonnatuns” knee-jerk response to a criticism. I’m sorry that there are people that have been treated badly by others anywhere in the fandom, including here. I hope that if I see something, I say something. I’m grateful that my fan experience here on Tumblr has been largely positive and I have benefitted from the debates I have participated in, and I want that for everyone.

FTR, I’m a curative fandom person, with flecks of transformative, I think, but you do you. Saying one is a more developed fandom is like saying Non-fiction is more intellectual reading than Fiction, you know?

And one last thing. WHY IS ANYONE STILL ON FACEBOOK???? It is not your friend. If you really want to see third cousin, twice-removed Myra’s Halloween photos, send her an email.

Curious! What about the call the midwife fandom do you dislike?

Because I have friends here, I’m going to be incredibly specific in how I answer this: I said Call the Midwife fandom pissed me off, specifically in relation to how that anger was generative for my writing, which is specifically a comment about 2016 and 2017, which is now…a while ago.

But someone recently shared with me that many of the things I found frustrating in 2016 are still true, both in CtM and in fandoms with ships that share similar traits, so I will share as gently as possible, because opening old wounds is dumb, and my friends are amazing, and fandom drama is deeply not how I want to spend my time.

1. The Turnadette segment of CtM fandom is more curative than transformative. And it is, as the link notes, somewhat unusual to find female-led fandoms that are super curative, but we do have one here. There are many summaries and discussions of what happened and whether the production team has reused the bathroom set, and many fewer discussions about character or relationships beyond the outline provided on the show. Curative fandom is not inherently better or worse than transformative fandom, but I do think many fans, especially experienced fans who go wandering into new fandoms from in other traditionally-female fandom spaces, come in expecting transformative fandom. It was entirely jarring to me to find myself, for the first time in twenty years of fandom, in a curative space, and as such it felt…weird, and kinda wrong, and not particularly welcoming. This wasn’t anybody’s fault! People think and love things in all different ways. But it was and remains a sort of unique and odd (to me) aspect of the fandom.

2. Turnadette fandom, as a subset of CtM fandom, is…pretty invested in the traditional, chaste, heterosexual, monogamous vision of Shelagh and Patrick as presented on the show. Which, like, I love that ship! That ship is what brought me here! But fandom–at least transformative fandom–is best for me when it pushes against the constraints of the show and says, “well, what if?” What if…Patrick was bisexual? What if…Shelagh wasn’t a virgin when she got married? What if aliens landed in Poplar? What if…Patrick and Sister Bernadette got it on when she was still a nun?

And there wasn’t a lot of this, especially when it came to exploring any aspect of their sexuality. And so I pushed myself to write about it, and started with The Best of What Might Be (which explores the last premise noted above) and then started asking: why isn’t there more smut in this fandom? And there were many answers, but two stood out:

One was that it wasn’t people’s thing, which on one hand – fair. Don’t like, don’t read! But on the other hand that story has 3250 hits (top single chapter story in the pairing on AO3!), so people were lying. They liked it, but they were ashamed to say so, and that bothered me a lot. Fandom was born and built on the backs of middle aged ladies who thought sex was hot. Why be ashamed?

And the other reason given was that Shelagh was too pure to have smut written about her, which is anti-feminist bullshit rooted in a deep history of policing women’s sexuality…and that also bothered me a lot. Fandom is the place that taught me about the wide diversity of human experience, and that women have every right to take up space, to want and like sex (or not), and to push past traditional expectations of what it means to be female and feminine. So…you know. Super no.

Since this whole thing blew up a million years ago now (I may have written a screed on this topic, made a joke about starting a flame war, was taken somewhat seriously, and made a good friend), the fandom has expanded its tastes somewhat. But it still sort of defaults to the chaste, traditional, monogamous view of these characters–because that’s what’s shown on screen, and this is a curative fandom.

3. There are complicated ways that fandoms are communities and ecosystems and the things above have an impact on what gets shared and recommended and on whose voices are heard most loudly. This means that people trying to write or have conversations outside the lines are often not heard, in a way that can feel like gatekeeping, even if no one involved intends it to. *shrug*

As I said, I’ve made great friends in CtM fandom, many of whom have talked to me about these challenges. Learning to write smut for “The Best of What Might Be” and its sequels was incredibly valuable to me as a writer, as was learning to write when my audience was ambivalent. Learning that sometimes you have to let a space and a fandom be what it is going to be, whether it is what you want or not, was also deeply important in my evolution as a fan.

And there you have it. Little bit of fannish history for your Tuesday.

cc: @my-little-yellowbird @professortennant @pellucidthings