#still writing that goldrush fanfic

[lilac-gold]

rip mikhael for being the lamest guy in his family

his siblings get a freakin banging battle theme in Headspace, it's something i've listened to on repeat for ages. but let's be honest, i don't think anyone listens to 'cram it wad' for more than once when skimming through Omori OSTs. it sounds okay, but his angsty preteen vibes and the noises of two sticks fighting to the death aren't exactly favourite song material. add that onto the fact that in HS they're gods while he's a flipping monkey, his siblings make giant cardboard cutouts of themselves & can predict what the other is going to say while mikhael's making dragon ball references and calling himself 'the maverick',,,

sorry mikhael, but it's no wonder those girls didn't even stick around for the money ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ 

[dannybobany]

Omori fanfic I’d like to write:

Post good ending Shortbread (Hero x Bowen) thanksgiving fic except it’s not about shortbread at all. It’s about the inevitable problem caused by trying to celebrate thanksgiving between these two families

Just IMAGINE it for a moment would you, Kel and Mikhael just realized that they have to celebrate this holiday and every other major holiday for the foreseeable future in the same room as each other and this fact is ruining everything for both of them

Bowen’s parents are trying their best to be supportive but as generally conservative people this is not easy for them, and they keep saying offensive things in front of Kel’s and Hero’s mom, who is trying very hard to tolerate this and be polite for Hero’s sake but these people are seriously getting on her nerves (made worse by the fact her husband is refusing to take sides because “I just don’t like getting political sweetie”)

Sunny and his Mom show up an hour in because Kel invited them…. Without telling Hero about it

Daphne is sitting in the corner trying her best to entertain Sally while silently panicking about the fact that she’s just noticed Hero’s dog is nowhere to be seen. Like the dog got out at some point and obviously this is a problem and she would feel really bad if something happened but bringing up “hey your dog is loose” in a house about to explode for five other reasons is not a good idea

Shenanigans ensue

Can also work with goldrush but it’s funnier if Kel and Mikhael still hate each other

[princesscolumbia]

So a small sidebar to all the everything I'm doing, I'm kinda using "Code of Ethics" to function as a bit of a warm-up for producing original fiction that will sell under the 'self-publishing' model. I'd eventually like to be able to get a full publishing deal for something, but that won't happen until I can show off my writing chops in a non-fanfic level of writing.

(Just to reassure my fans of my Ranmafics and Horsefics, no, I have not abandoned writing any of those)

With that in mind, I've had a few projects that aren't fanfic based sitting in my "to write" pile that I haven't gotten to because I was operating under the notion that nobody would read my stuff if I wasn't writing fanfics. Well, CoE is damn near the closest to fully original fanfic I've ever written. Sure, I use QuietVallerie's framework and foundation for it, but I've got completely original characters (I've MENTIONED some names in the other Troubleverse books, but if I were to swap those out this would be a fully 'ties-cut' original fic from the character standpoint), a VRMMO setting that I'm stitching together from whole cloth and a lot of inspiration from a game QuietVallerie doesn't even play, and the ending isn't dependent on anything QuietValerie's doing whatsoever. She's even acknowledged that most of her work is blatantly 'inspired' by other sci-fi works, so even if all I did was change a few names it'd be a wholly original fic that simply drew from the same inspirational sources for Troubleverse.

That said, I want to keep CoE a firmly Troubleverse fic. Not only would I like to someday (hopefully, wishful thinking, please-please-please-please-please!!!) be granted 'canon' status by QV, I dislike the notion that I should divorce MY stuff from its origin just to make a little cash. The people that are reading CoE are doing so because I set it up as a Troubleverse fic, attempting to divorce my work from that franchise after I've gained a following would be disingenuous at best.

So all that brings me to my first (public) foray into original fiction. I've decided I'll be posting to the following with a 1-week gap when I publish a chapter, and I'll be aiming for 1 chapter per week:

Patreon

Scribblehub

Archive of Our Own

And what, you may ask, will be my first project? I put the choice to my most important audience in all the multiverse; my daughter. From the available options I gave her, she picked...

Goldrush, CO

Over a century after its establishment as a 'company town' for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the town of Goldrush, Colorado was finally sold off "at cost" to the town citizens, fully separating them from the agency that jumped the shark during the union busting of the 1900s. The town has secrets, starting with the biggest one of all; Goldrush was founded as a 'dumping grounds' for the weird and unwelcome. From dumb artifacts that can control the weather (and corrupt the user) to steampunk androids to a pod of selkies, if the Pinkertons were hired to investigate and dispose of it and it was in some way 'supernatural,' then it went to Goldrush. Now that the town's independent, they still have an entire warehouse district of artifacts and paraphernalia that doesn't officially exist that needs to be stored and managed, so the town hires a logistics specialist. Lois is a woman who's just looking to start over after a nasty divorce that was followed by the tragic death of her ex-wife. So she packed her bags and moved to Goldrush from San Diego in hopes of immersing herself in the history of the unusual town to forget her own tragic history. If only she could do her job without bumping heads with the (unreasonably attractive, built like a Valkyrie from myth and legend, frustratingly stubborn) town sheriff the new job would be perfect.

If you're picking up shades of "Warehouse 13" and (more subtly) "Mystic Bayou," I've done my job in selling this right.

June will be all about finishing CoE as quickly as possible (while still maintaining the quality I demand of myself) so I can clear the decks and focus on doing as much with Goldrush, CO during July as I can before I start releasing on Patreon in August.

I'm excited about this, I hope you are, too!

[drtanner]

Popularity for writers in fandom spaces is usually, in my experience, determined by who gets there first. A new Thing comes out, people rush to write stuff for it, and the first person who writes something pretty okay for it (and keeps writing stuff that's pretty okay) will be the person who grabs the audience. Since folks are desperate for any content they can get their hands on at this stage, the bar for quality is fairly low and the work doesn't have to be amazing to get attention.

I've been this person a couple of times over the years! To this day, my multi-chapter DBD fic remains the most popular work on my AO3; I was one of the first to write something substantial for that fandom and now it's in lots of rec lists; I haven't touched DBD for a long time but still get comments on it on a fairly regular basis.

However.

Once a fandom is more established, you'll tend to find that two things happen:

Everyone has decided who their favourite writers are and will be less willing to give someone whose work they aren't familiar with a chance, and

A lot more people are now writing for that fandom, so it's less likely that your stuff will be noticed by anyone amongst the noise just by virtue of the numbers involved.

This makes it much, much harder to build an audience for yourself and your work! Unlike fanart, which can be appreciated passively and immediately, fanfic requires one to sit down and read it, to actively engage with it for potentially hours or days, and a lot of people aren't willing to spend that time and effort on something they don't already know that they will enjoy. It's really tough getting anyone to read your work if you get to the party late, like I usually do. :')

Obviously, the quality of your work has absolutely nothing to do with any of this and even if you were objectively and indisputably the best writer in the world, you would still go wholly unrecognised if no one ever discovered your work to read it. I don't know what the answer to this problem is, because I can't honestly recommend that you treat fandom writing like a goldrush wherein you hurry to stake your claim on every new Thing that comes out the instant it appears in order to capture an audience while it's still reasonably possible to do so. That isn't a fun way to write, or do anything in fandom, and you're going to have a bad time. Readers could certainly help with this issue by giving writers they don't know more of their time and recommending more poorly-read fic to their friends, and by reblogging fic when they see it here on Tumblr and elsewhere, but it's tough to convince them to do that, lmao. Your options as a writer are frustratingly limited.

So yeah, don't worry about it, man. Your writing is fine, it's just tough out there. :')

In fanfiction there is a difference between being a good writer and a popular writer. 

Just because you can write a well-structured story with dynamic and consistent writing and characters doesn’t mean you will be popular. And sometimes stories that have disorganized plots, mediocre writing, and/or OOC characters will be held up as the greatest things to ever exist. 

Just because your writing isn’t popular doesn’t mean you are a bad writer. Don’t ever compromise who you are, who your characters are, your plot, your writing style, anything for the sake of readership.

There are popular writers everywhere. But there are only so many good writers.