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tailsrevane · 1 year

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my dream crossovers

this was another patreon-exclusive post that i'm posting here now because i'm not on patreon anymore. this one was from august of 2022.

i’ve been reading a lot of crossover comics lately between my alien vs. predator reviews and i also recently read (and really enjoyed) the teenage mutant ninja turtles/batman crossover.

on that note, i will say that there are a few i would definitely do if they didn’t already exist? including the aforementioned batman/teenage mutant ninja turtles crossover, as well as teenage mutant ninja turtles/power rangers (i would totally redo this one if it were only the next mutation/power rangers in space crossover, but there’s also a comic book that has the mighty morphin power rangers meeting the ninja turtles), king kong vs. planet of the apes, star trek/planet of the apes and teenage mutant ninja turtles/ghostbusters.

i also probably would’ve wanted to do like a star trek vs. star wars type deal back when i was way more into star wars, but i’m just so apathetic about the star wars franchise at this point that it really just doesn’t seem like a good thing for me to try to weigh in on. or any other star wars crossover, for that matter.

so! with all of those being cleared out of the way, let’s get into my dream crossovers that i would love to see become a reality.

godzilla vs. gamera

this is literally the first one that always occurs to me when this topic comes up, and the bitch of it is it almost happened. kadokawa actually approached toho in 2002 and offered to co-produce the mega-crossover, but unfortunately toho declined. the two did battle each other in a stage show in 1970, but otherwise the standard bearers for their respective kaiju universes have yet to properly meet.

thinking about what form this epic showdown could take, obviously the difficulty curve on a comic book feels like it should be the lowest, and is often where these kinds of crossovers start. unfortunately i’m actually not really super versed in godzilla’s comic book exploits, so i can’t really meaningfully comment on this. but considering godzilla vs. charles barkley was a thing back in the 90s and godzilla vs. the mighty morphin power rangers is a thing today, it feels like he should be able to take gamera on in comic book form, right?

the ultimate goal would be a live-action movie, though. and as much as i do love legendary’s cgi godzilla movies this would obviously be a suitmation affair. the plot will work itself out, i mean, it’s godzilla vs. gamera. as long as you give me what it promises on the tin, we’re gonna be fine.

sonic the hedgehog/teenage mutant ninja turtles

my starting point here is that a lot of the characters just match up very well. shads and leo are very serious and dedicated. knux and raph are angy and strong in so many ways. donnie and tails do machines. mikey and sonic are extremely silly and have absolutely the biggest, kindest hearts on their respective teams.

you lose this a bit with the primary villains as eggman is much more comically inept than literally any version of shredder other than the 1987 cartoon or next mutation. but if you bring satam eggman energy to the character you can probably have them coexist either as rival bad guys or teaming up to make everyone’s lives miserable.

obviously eggman is going to make all kinds of turtle-themed robots for this shit, fuck. probably mecha or metal versions of all the turtles, too. dude has one move and he’s gonna use it.

teenage mutant ninja turtles vs. x-men

the only acceptable medium for this is an animated movie, the overall look of which will be based on the 90s arcade games. the x-men team will be composed of the characters you’re able to select from in the arcade game: cyclops, colossus, wolverine, storm, nightcrawler, and dazzler.

the story will be very simple. the turtles and x-men will start off fighting through shredder/magneto’s minions separately and end up fighting each other at first but then end up teaming up when they realize shredder and magneto are working together. these will be the arcade game versions of both villains, so shredder will basically be a less pathetic version of his cartoon self and magneto will have no real character other than being evil and powerful.

teen titans/teenage mutant ninja turtles

look i know this list is very heavy with ninja turtles, but it’s just kind of amazing how many high profile mashups with the ninja turtles have been left on the table. also in the x-men crossover they had “mutant” in common, and in this one they have “teenage” in common, so we’re staying on theme, alright?

for this crossover i’m thinking we get the dc animated movie universe version of the teen titans. y’know, the ones from justice league vs. teen titans and teen titans: the judas contract. i just love this lineup with nightwing and starfire as their fearless leaders, i’d love more time to develop damian wayne robin and raven’s relationship, and beast boy and blue beetle are just the absolute best boys.

cyborg can come too.

sonic the hedgehog/batman

on paper there’s absolutely no reason this should work, but i’m sorry i just need sonic fanboying all over bats, shads trying to out-edgy him, knux taking damian or jason under his wing, tails bonding with tim drake over brain stuff and/or dick grayson over favorite sidekick stuff, and alfred just being sassy about literally everything.

also maybe flash can make a cameo just to set up the obvious race between him and sonic.

x-files vs. resident evil

you really think a zombie outbreak happens in a major city without fox mulder catching wind of it and bursting into the office that morning with a hearty “scully you’re not gonna believe this”?

given that i’m referencing the larger raccoon city outbreak i’d want this to be set around when resident evil 2 came out (1998), which places it around when season 6 of the x-files and the x-files movie came out. so obviously live-action is right out, so we’d be looking at either a comic book or cgi movie.

my thinking here is that mulder hears about the early stages of the outbreak from either the lone gunmen or one of his other sources. mysterious outbreak, corporate and police overreach, does this not sound like exactly the setup for an x-files episode? scully rolls her eyes at all his insinuations that they’re about to be in a real-life zombie movie but is happy to go along to try to deal with the weird police state bullshit happening, they see some creepy stuff early on and then get caught in the thick of the huge outbreak.

eventually they meet up with leon and claire and kick all kinds of zombie ass before making a desperate escape on the train and then we get some patented mulder/scully field note typing voiceovers (or text boxes if it’s a comic) to close things out.

out of all of these, this might be the one i have the clearest idea in my head of what it would be like. even though it’s probably not a crossover that would occur to most people unprompted, it feels kind of like a no-brainer when you think about it.

she-ra (2018) vs. thundercats (2011)

due to the tragic cancellation of the extremely fun thundercats reboot after just one season, this is the least likely one to actually happen. but, c’mon! the main hero has a sword with superpowers, there’s furries, this one is kinda obvious!

i think our catboys think the horde are the good guys at first because animal people are much more well-represented there, setting up the lion-o vs. adora fight. but when they figure out the horde are the bad guys, we get lion-o vs. catra! also mumm-ra teams up with the horde probably.

honorable mentions

star trek/ninja turtles

i don’t have much of a justification for this or an idea of how it would work, but idw owns both licenses and there were action figures depicting all the turtles as star trek characters so obviously i’m not the first one to have this thought!

teenage mutant ninja turtles vs. universal monsters

another one there were crossover action figures of. make it happen!

teenage mutant ninja turtles/kung fu panda

i didn’t super want to go to the trouble of fleshing this one out, but it feels like another no-brainer. and obviously mikey would have the biggest crush on tigress after she beat him up. obviously.

james bond vs. mission: impossible

another one i didn’t super want to flesh out, but ethan hunt’s real superpower is having friends so he’d kick james bond’s ass.

the owl house/she-ra (2018)

sadly i wasn’t really able to come up with a super concrete idea for this one, but both of these cartoons hit such similar spots that it really feels like there should be something here.

#godzilla #gamera #sonic the hedgehog #teenage mutant ninja turtles #x-men #teen titans #batman #x-files #resident evil #she-ra #thundercats #thundercats 2011 #star trek #universal monsters #kung fu panda #james bond #mission: impossible #the owl house

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ostensiblyarticulate · 3 years

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I wrote (and am writing) things

I’ve been meaning to do this for literally weeks. SO, this one goes out to all like 10 people who follow this tumblr for my writing. I appreciate you and am sure it’s a terribly tedious experience, and have promised myself I will AT LEAST post the stuff I’ve written here. Especially as my ao3 catalog gets, while objectively not that long, far longer than I ever expected.

I did a couple halloween exchanges; here’s what’s new:

Mirabelle, a brief original fairy taleish piece I affectionately refer to as “Faeries!!!” and which is, more or less, about faeries. Also tfw you’re a changeling and you’re kind of hot for the human you got switched with at birth.

Oh well, what's life (without a few dragons?), a brief crossover I affectionately refer to as “Dragons!!!” and which is, more or less, about dragons. Charlie Weasley & Daenerys Targaryen.

The company of witches, a Squire’s Tales fanfic I affectionately refer to as “Witches!!!” and which is, more or less, about the way women pass down magic and wisdom through generations (not the first time I’ve hit that topic, either...almost like I have feelings about it). I understand from friends that it’s still a fun read out of context, but it’s mostly a love letter to a deeply obscure children’s arthurian retelling series that was really fucking formative for me growing up. I am proud (tho sad) to say that it is currently the one and only fic in its pairing tag.

If you ARE one of the ten people following me for writing, you’re probably like “these are not the catgirl and jock I signed up for, wtf,” so I will note that I am very much still writing catradora. Actually, the sheer amount of drafts I have in progress rn is likely why none of them are done - I’m spreading my energy a bit (also, things are just busy, happy November). I can’t promise all these will go all the way, but in my drafts rn you’d find...

...two Squad Goes Intergalactic oneshots, one of which is an outsider pov and the other of which is a Catra character study ft. musings on her canonical string of shitty bosses.

...a collab project I’m still hype as fuck about. I fucking love weddings.

...the single most self-indulgent thing I’ve ever written in my entire life. And I wrote poetry as a teenager.

...an arranged marriage AU that’s 13 chapters long and off-and-on taking over my life.

...an actual Star Trek AU.

...another??? Collab??? Jury’s very out.

So: stay tuned.

Also personal housekeeping that I’m writing here so I can pin it and won’t forget - am actually making a writing tag. Just using my ao3 username because there are no variations I can get wrong on that. Hopefully this means I’ll scream into this void a bit more about my writing, which may let me spare my good good wonderful friends a little of the endless liveblog.

#forsythiarising #fanfiction #catradora

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bluescreening · 4 years

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Book Recommendations: Dystopias

A lot of people find dystopian fiction depressing. I actually find them uplifting, since it makes the real world seem a whole lot brighter! Well, I can’t promise that the world right now is actually any better than them, but we can dream. Here are some of the best. All blurbs written by me unless otherwise specified.

Also, this post deleted itself halfway through me writing it. Ah, the things I struggle through for you people. The reviews I painstakingly re-write. The show must go on.

The Handmaid’s Tale (and The Testaments) by Margaret Atwood - The Republic of Gilead is ruled by right-wing Christian extremists, and freedom for women is a rare commodity. Offred’s value lies in her reproductive ability, stolen from many other women by high levels of radiation. She must find a way to escape before she outlives her usefulness.

I know, I know, it’s typical, but hear me out (or scroll down for more original ones). This book is heartbreaking, it’s beautiful, it’s terrifying and most importantly it’s very applicable to modern society. I’m sure you’ve all heard people go on for ages about how it technically excels, but I want to talk about how Atwood never once falls into the trap of showing characters getting stronger by making them more masculine. Offred and the other female characters all embrace their femininity in different ways, and they are all strong while also being women, something many young adult writers seem to think is impossible. I expect nothing less from this great author. The Testaments went through the same prejudice as all sequels from reviewers, but I think it was wonderfully done and answers plenty of questions about Gilead and the world watching it.

Chaos Walking (The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men) by Patrick Ness - There are a couple of strange things about Prentisstown. There are no women, and everyone can hear each other’s thoughts. Even the animals. Todd Hewitt is the youngest one in town, and he’s determined to find out the secrets of his home.

Ah, Patrick Ness, the only author on the planet who can reliably make me cry. And hoo boy, is there lots of crying to be had in this series. Emotional turmoil ahoy! No but seriously, once you get over the way the main character’s accent is written (which made me pass by this book more than once) the story told throughout the series is deeply heartfelt, frightening and above all human. Topics from war to gender to segregation to what it means to be human are all covered in a way suitable for youngsters while also managing to be compelling and intense to adults. A slightly offbeat dystopia, but one with worldbuilding that cannot be scoffed at.

The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) by Suzanne Collins - Panem is divided into 12 districts, who each provide cheap labour for the illustrious Capitol. Each year 24 children are forced to fight to the death to quell uprising in the districts. That is, untill Katniss Everdeen comes along to shake things up.

Everyone knows the Hunger Games. But if you’ve only watched the films, I strongly suggest you read the books. The media industry did what the Capitol did, and threw out the real story to focus on a romance that isn’t even real within the context of the books. If you have read the books, check out The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. It’s a prequel, focusing on how President Snow got to be... like that. Despite mixed reviews I really enjoyed it, and it was very nostalgic for me, considering I was pretty much obsessed with Panem for several years.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury - Montag is a firefighter, but not in the normal sense. His job is to burn books, protecting the people from the knowledge within. A meeting with a teenager called Clarisse has thrown his worldview into disarray, and his wife is going insane.

This book is standing in for all my old dystopias - 1984, Animal Farm, We - for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I recently realised 1984 creeped me out as a kid because of how r*pey it was and I need to re-read and re-assess whether I like it or not. Secondly, because I think it’s really quite poignant in the current information age. We have access to the internet to co-ordinate, learn and educate each other. The sum total of all human knowledge is here. If we didn’t, would we be able to rebel as we do now? Or would we simply go along with what we are told, because we have never been told otherwise? Also, Ray Bradbury is a legend and is likely to pop up in my upcoming short stories list quite a lot. Bear in mind that this is a very thinky book so don’t pick it up as a light summer read, pick it up for introspection and criticism of censorship in our society.

Vox by Christina Dalcher - Women are limited to 100 words per day, at risk of a near-fatal electric shock if they overstep. Girls are swiftly losing the ability to speak, read and write. Dr Jean McClellan is going to change that if it kills her.

One big criticism of this book is that it’s too similar to the Handmaid’s Tale. I have to agree to a certain extent, but there are some key differences that make it a worthy read on its own. The pace, for one thing, is a lot faster, with more action which might make it a great option if you haven’t got the patience for Atwood’s style. It feels a lot more like a typical young adult dystopia without losing any of the moral punch of HT. Also, it emphasises the importance of communication for rebellion a lot more than HT. I think its message needs to be said again and again, and that the stylistic and plot differences not only make it accessible for more people but also lend themselves to a more personal story. Let the reviewers whine. It’s one of my favourites.

The Broken Trilogy (Broken Sky, Darkness Follows and Black Moon) by L. A. Weatherly - Amity is a Peacefighter, charged with competing in dogfights with other regions’ representatives in lieu of actual war. But corruption has its teeth deep into the Peacefights, and there is a tanged web of espionage, rebellion and... astrology?

Yep, that’s right folks, this is a dystopia in which your star chart determines whether you live or die. Sure, it sounds goofy, but surprisingly enough it works extremely well as a premise, and who are we to talk trash about insane government officials? Amity is a deep, exciting character, and she’s joined by a really compelling cast including a secretive astrologer and Amity’s love interest. Unfortunately, the love story feels quite forced, but fortunately the rest of the story is so good you can struggle through. The first book is a slight trek to get into, but once you do, there’s a hell of a cliffhanger waiting for you. I shall say no more.

And that about wraps up my forays into dystopian fiction! As you can probably tell I’m obsessed so expect a second post when I’ve collected a few more. Might have to divide it into feminist and other :/

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sieben9 · 6 years

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“a bitter draught” impressions

{Quick request to anyone reading: I’m watching OUaT for the first time, and I want to avoid spoilers. So, if you want to discuss something spoilery, I’d be grateful if you could start a new post for that. Thank you!}

Dear OUaT,

you can’t keep doing this. Seriously, I’m already busy trying to get one horribly camp musical score out of my head, you can’t just go and add another one.

::”Hell To Your Doorstep” plays in the distance::

Though I call shenanigans on Edmond’s age. This babyface is NOT old enough to have been of an age to take over a captain’s position before being arrested and spending fourteen years in jail.

…yes, I have very specific niche problems. It happens. Anyway, short version of this one: fantastic character episode that was not-quite buried under somewhat mediocre pacing. More under the cut.

So, to elaborate on that unkind statement: I liked the episode. A lot. What I didn’t like was the pacing of the first 20 minutes or so before the dock scene, which had me drifting off more than once, even though I enjoyed what was actually on screen.

For example, I did like the fact that Emma got some “sequel” scenes to process what happened last episode, but either they were too long or they were in the wrong place or whathaveyou, but for whatever reason, they made the plot screech to a sudden stop every. Damn. Time. And I’m all for depicting these characters as actually getting professional help with their issues, but the framing isn’t really working for me and slid right over into navel-gazing. Good idea, OUaT, but try again.

“this is my anxious face. it’s currently doing triple duty as my excited face and my angry face, as well.”

I’m also not super in love with the whole “I’m worried Regina is under that hood” twist, because 1) really, Emma? At this point? And 2) it seems a little trite.

Oh, and one more very important question:

What in the name of sanity are you wearing, woman?

Anyway, on to the good stuff, which was pretty much entirely going on at wherever Regina was. This episode delivered on some of the more obvious promises of this arc, and it did so excellently.

For one, this episode very clearly externalised Regina’s usually internal conflict and it also comes with a bonus villain who’s actually competent and knows how to get under the protagonist’s skin.

It also touched on a topic that I personally was hoping for, specifically the idea that Good/Evil (or Light/Dark, as it may be) aren’t just fixed passive qualities a person has, but rather the result of their decisions and actions. The show goes a bit back and forth on this (looking at you, Judgey Season Four Tree), but I definitely like this approach a whole lot more and it’s nice to see that we seem to be going that route for this particular arc.

This episode also establishes clearly that, yes, the Evil Queen is still very much out for revenge on Snow, which puts Regina’s actions in the show since around season 2 in an interesting light. Obviously, you don’t just “get over” a decade-long grudge, but that’s not what this is. The Queen isn’t just angry with Snow, she still wants her dead. Which means that part of Regina wanted her dead all this time. Again, it has been implied, but seeing it out in the open like this gives a new dynamic to this internal conflict.

Oh, and just so I don’t forget it: Lana Parilla was fantastic in this episode. Are you kidding me? Sure, on this show, most people play more than one “version” of their character, and often within the same episode, but I could actually see differences between “Evil Queen Regina” and “Evil-Queen-without-Regina” and I’m sure if I went back to the end of s5 and compared “Regina-without-the-Queen” with “regular Regina”, I’d find differences there, too. Just… wow. Good work. Kind of makes me wish these people got to interact with their “old/other selves” more often. (Rumple/Imp-faceoff is what I’m saying here, mostly. I want one.)

All of this also makes me really curious about how they will resolve this. I’m still hoping for the Star Trek theory of split personalities, myself, but that brings other problems with it. Whatever happened before, the Queen is now out there, making choices and forming memories of her own. She’s a fully realised person, albeit a pretty evil one. Would recombining with Regina “kill” that person? Am I jumping to conclusions by assuming that Regina’s “good” half would even be the dominant one? …yeah, I know, watch to find out what happens and all that.

I did like the backstory reveal about the Land of Untold Stories. I’m definitely excited and at least a little morbidly curious to see who else is going to get screwed over when their story plays out, now. (I mean, I’ve read the Musketeer sequels and I wouldn’t want to live through those, either…)

good for you, my friends

I feel like Edmond’s story was a little under-utilised, but I admit, I wasn’t expecting that much more. I suppose I’ve gotten used to the “ooh, shiny” effect.

::looks at Rumbelle plot::

::long sigh::

This is stupid. And I really hope for Belle’s sake that she’s one of the few women who don’t suffer from pregnancy-induced morning sickness.

Also, that was definitely one of the more mealy-mouthed apologies on this show. I get that it was a case of “better late than never”, but the framing was so lacklustre and forgiveness so easy (yeah, he’s changed… sure he has.) that maybe “never” actually would have been the better option here. (I’m also less than happy how this was put into direct contrast to Belle’s current troubles with Rumple, because that didn’t seem relevant at the time, but I will admit that I’m just not objective on that topic.)

::even longer sigh::

Though I did get one hilarious screenshot from this:

context? what context?

Only 9 episodes to go…

And while we’re on the topic of “this is stupid”:

There’s… uh, a Thing that gets introduced this episode, and while “retroactive continuity” is basically at the heart of this show’s mode of storytelling, and it’s often a good thing, I’m calling shenanigans on the Regina/Rumple thing. That’s not filling an unexplored space in the backstory, and it actively contradicts how they were treating each other up until this point.

I mean, I’m guess I’m stuck with it for the time being, but it’s weird and I don’t like it. In fact, I think I’ll just… ignore it really intensely until it either a) becomes relevant to the plot, b) goes away by itself, or c) both.

…ahem. Anyway. Very good episode. Could still have used another revision on the pacing.

#ouat #once upon a time #a bitter draught #sieben watches ouat #sieben talks #sorry for disappearing again #in my defence: i do have a new job #it's great! i love it #(i missed lab work...)#it also eats a lot of time

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dontgobreakingmyart · 5 years

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Fanfiction: Why Is It So Popular?

As someone on tumblr, you probably know what fanfiction is and know why it is popular. My AP Literature teacher, however, wasn’t so informed.

My senior year, we were required to write a research paper about a trend. Some people did the rate of divorce, others did the increase of body modification and someone even did the death of Pokemon Go.

Our teacher recommended that we chose a topic that we were familiar with, and my first 2 thoughts were fanfiction and anime. I had already had a friend that had done anime the year the before, so I thought “why not?”

And thus, my senior paper was born:

March , 2018

Fanfiction: Why Is It So Popular?

INTRODUCTION:

Generally, the word “fanfiction” conjures an image of lonely hermits, obsessive fans, or even dangerous flirtation with copyrights, but lately, fanfiction has been given a new face―a face of validity, expression, and even publication. Since January 2012, the amount of fanfiction for just one fandom (a collection of fans supporting a certain medium) has increased an astonishing 1,154% (Pellegrini). Objectively, fanfiction is a fan-made story that contains strong elements of the original work, generally using the same characters, themes, and other various components. For example, there are numerous works based off Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, continuing on the story of Mr. and Mrs. Darcy; in fact, there has been a recent increase of published novels based on Pride and Prejudice of 32% since 2015 (“List of Literary Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice”). Why? Because fans were not satisfied with the original content; they wanted to see more of Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship or they wondered what the characters would do in a zombie apocalypse or any other variation of “what if?” Fanfiction allows “amateur writers” to express their love for a book, tv show, game, etc., and whether it’s because of the lack of LGBT themes in most published works or the increasing ease of sharing their fiction, fanfiction writers are not likely to stop any time soon (Knorr).

BACKGROUND / HISTORY:

Although it might seem very unbelievable, fanfiction did not just start recently, or a couple decades ago, or in the 70s with that one Star Trek fanfiction. In fact, a good amount of older literature is fanfiction. If fanfiction is being defined as “any work of fiction that borrows major elements of another work of fiction,” then works such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet could technically count as fanfiction; Hamlet was originally an “ancient Scandinavian folk tale . . .[known as] ‘Vita Amlethi’ (‘The Life of Amleth’)” that Shakespeare not only re-wrote as a play, but inserted his own, personal experiences (Clark). The Iliad, The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex were all orally-told, Greek myths that someone decided needed to be written down. The only reason theses works are not recognized as “fanfiction” was because copyright was not as strict in that time and practically did not exist; after all, no one knows for sure who the real Shakespeare was because he did not officially claim his work.

Fanfiction didn’t really become a label until Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in the 1880s and with the birth of the internet, the famous Star Trek fanfiction. Officially, “the actual term ‘fanfiction’ was coined in 1939” and was used as an insult towards crudely written sci-fi fiction (Reich). In the late 90s and early 00s, rather than the “all-purpose” fanfiction cites today, “fans carved out their own little homes on the burgeoning internet. Star Trek fans here, X-Files fans there, Frasier fans somewhere else” (Hill). Most of those sites, however, have since died and have been replaced with the “all-purpose” ones like fanfiction.net. One of the most infamous modern fanfictions is E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey. Although it is technically a published novel, James has admitted that her novel was simply a Twilight fanfiction that she had written and aftered so that she wouldn’t break the copyright (Morrison). The largest development to the world of fanfiction, however, was the birth of Archiveofourown.org in 2007, a fanfiction website that “promised stronger resistance to legal challenges” to fanfiction writers unlike other, previous websites such as fanfiction.net (Burt). With the creation of this site, older ones have begun to die out just like the fandom-centric ones of the past.

#1 REASON:

Over the years, fanfiction has morphed from a shameful pass time to a socially acceptable medium of expression. Published authors have been, in fact, recommending fanfiction as a positive way to start writing. The author of the Princess Diaries Meg Cabot came out about her fanfiction writing, saying, “I myself used to write Star Wars fan fiction when I was tween. I think writing fanfiction is a good way for new writers to learn to tell a story” (Romano). And many other famous authors have made a contribution to the fanfiction community: Cassandra Clare, author of Mortal Instrument Series; Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game; S. E. Hinton, author of The Outsiders; Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman Series, and so many others (O’Brien, Kovach).

While visiting a Writing Workshop, the published author hosting it, Pamela Thibodeaux, encouraged me to begin writing and posting fanfiction in order to start a healthy fanbase, so that when I go to get a book published, the transition is much smoother. Writing fanfiction is just as stimulating as writing an original novel. In a CNN article about fanfiction, they explicitly stated that “even if the subject matter is a little blue [writing fanfiction] is a positive form of self-expression,” compelling parents to “encourage writing” (Knorr). In fact, the main difference between the two is that writing fanfiction “takes the pressure of world-building off” which allows the writer to explore their writing style without getting tangled up in creating something from scratch (McQuien). In a way, fanfiction is the box of cake mix in the literature world―it helps amateurs to take the first step of baking without getting too overwhelmed, but in the end, it can taste just as good.

#2 REASON:

As the overall acceptance and validity of fanfiction has increased, fanfiction has found its way into the publishing world, being branded as actual literature. Time-honored novels such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice have several published, fan-made additions and recreations of the original tale like Pride and Prejudice II: The Sequel by Victoria Park and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which was turned into a filmed phenomena in 2016 (“List of Literary Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice”). Although there have been many literary adaptations of this novel spanning as far back as 1932, there has been a 32% increase of published fanfictions just for this fandom (“List of Literary Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice”).

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has also witnessed this movement with his iconic Sherlock Holmes series, especially with the popular television series Sherlock, a “modernization” (or modern au [alternate universe] in fanfiction jargon) of the classic cases between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (“8 unconventional Sherlock Holmes adaptations”). These published fanfictions have been able to keep the trademarked names of their beloved characters, but many novels had to undergo extensive editing to cross the line of “fanfiction” into “literature.”

One of the most famous, or rather infamous, examples of this is how E. L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey was originally a Twilight fanfiction (Morrison). Another, perhaps not as well known, is L. Stoddard Hancock’s Cruel and Beautiful World, which was heavily based off of J. K. Rowling’s beloved Harry Potter; in fact, her novel indulges the ship [romantic pairing] of Hermione and Draco, fondly known as “Dramione” in the Harry Potter fandom (Sarner). While some fanfictions have to undergo a facelift in order to be published, their true identity still remains intact: they are still devoted extensions to the esteemed works of another author.

#3 REASON:

Fanfiction has evolved greatly throughout history, and how to post fanfictions and share them with the world is just getting easier and easier. As mentioned prior, the creation of Archive of Our Own revolutionized the world of fanfiction with its promise of legal support, but how? In 2002, there was a great purging of fanfictions on the original fanfiction posting website, fanfiction.net, shaking the fanfiction community and dissuading writers from posting their fanfics (Silver). It was this sort of mass-banning on works that encouraged the creation of Archive of Our Own and its legal branch the “Organization of Transformative works” where they “clarify the legality of fanfiction, champion fan-created works whenever they were legally challenged, and provide fans with legal resources in case they were targeted by copyright claims” (Silver). In short, Archive of Our Own gave fanfic writers a safe place to share their fanfictions.

Because of this difference with websites, despite the age difference and advantage Fanfiction.net may have with it, the increase of Harry Potter fanfictions on Archive of Our Own, for example, have increased 795% more than those on Fanfiction.net since 2010 (Pellegrini). Not only that, but Archive of Our Own has many other unique features that makes both writing fanfictions and reading fanfictions much more convenient such as tagging (Romano). Speaking from personal experience as a user of both Fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own, although the first is not a bad place to read fanfiction, it is not nearly as user-friendly. For example, if I wanted to read a Harry Potter fanfiction, I could easily do so on both sites, but if I wanted to read a Harry Potter fanfiction that had the ship “Dramione” or had “zombies” or where Fred didn’t die, I can only specify those tags on Archive of Our Own to find that perfect fanfiction. And fanfiction sites are still continuing to expand, to shape, to mold themselves in order to fit the preferences of the ever-evolving writers that post on them.

#4 REASON:

The world of literature is a diverse melting pot of ideas and people, but even with this diversity, there are many minorities that are pushed to the side such as the LGBT community―in the world of fanfiction, however, they are the majority. Seeing LGBT often connotes inaccurate concepts, especially in literature, where one thinks “gay” when they see LGBT and then “the label of ‘gay’ often overshadows the important elements of the story/author, often tarnish[ing] the book before it can be read” (Guy). The LGBT community is so much more than just “gay,” and those different branches are very rarely explored in published literature, but in fanfiction, they florrish.

Although majority of fanfiction does involve romance and a good amount of it involves couples of the same sex, that is not the only layer as is with most “gay” literature. In fanfiction, everyone is represented―if you want to read a fanfiction where the main character is asexual, where the main character is genderfluid, where there’s a polyromantic relationship, where someone is aromantic, bisexual; no matter what it is you want, I can almost guarantee it’s out there somewhere. The fanfiction website Archive of Our Own found that only 38% of their users were heterosexual, meaning that at least 62% belong to the LGBT community and more people identified as genderqueer than as male (Hu). Everyone wants to be represented in media, to have someone to relate to.

The little gay literature that is there, is only just now being reprinted, falling out of print since the 80’s, and a good amount of it is being banned (Healey). For example, Amazon refused to sell a gay Victorian novel, claiming it was “pornagraphic,” yet they have an entire section for “erotic” fiction such as 50 Shades of Grey (Healey). With fanfiction, writers don’t have to worry about labels, whether a couple is straight or homosexual or genderqueer or whatever. Writers care about the stories, the chemistry between the characters that make them a dynamic duo, and with fanfiction, writers can share that.

CONCLUSION:

Fanfiction has existed for centuries with Sophocles's Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek and it shows no sign of stopping now. In fact, the amount of fanfiction hasn’t just increased because of its acceptance or its publication or the ease of posting, but because of new and continuous material.

Before the release of BBC’s show Sherlock, there were fanfictions based on the original book, and the addition of the show allowed Sherlock Holmes and John Watson to become more familiar, and thus, more fanfictions to be added to the overall fandom. The same occured with the Harry Potter fandom. When Jack Thorne’s play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (a published fanfiction continuing J.K. Rowling’s original series Harry Potter), fanfiction writers exploded with new material, new ideas, and new fanfictions; a total of 1,682 fanfictions concerning Harry Potter and the Cursed Child have been posted on Archive of Our Own since the play’s release date in 2016 (Search Results for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child). Due to the recent release of Voltron: Legendary Defender in 2016, there has been a staggering 5,054% increase of fanfiction for the show originally from the 80’s (Search Results for Voltron).

With every reinstatement of a show, a new generation of potential fanfiction writers are exposed to it, adding on to the classic mediums other fanfiction writers wrote about before them such as Star Trek or Sex in the City, where there are still significant increases of 8,600% since 2005 and the show ended in 2004 (Kneale). Fanfiction increases because more and more people are being exposed to that world. Just as there will always be incoming literature and TV shows and movies, new fanfictions will be trailing in afterwards like a relentless shadow.

Works Cited

“Archive of Our Own Beta.” Archive of Our Own, www.archiveofourown.org/works/search?utf8=✓&work_search[query]=Harry potter and the cursed child.

“Archive of Our Own Beta.” Archive of Our Own, www.archiveofourown.org/works/search?utf8=✓&work_search[query]=Voltron.

Burt, Stephanie. “The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 23 Aug. 2017, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-promise-and-potential-of-fan-fiction.

Clark, Cassandra. “‘Hamlet’ Origins: The Legend of Amleth.” Shake It Up, 28 June 2017, sfshakes.wordpress.com/2017/06/28/hamlet-origins-the-legend-of-amleth/.

“Eight Unconventional Sherlock Holmes Adaptations.” The Week - All You Need to Know about Everything That Matters, 29 Feb. 2012, theweek.com/articles/477729/8-unconventional-sherlock-holmes-adaptations.

Guy, Lauren. “What's the Point of LGBT Literature?” The University Times, 16 Oct. 2016, www.universitytimes.ie/2016/10/whats-the-point-of-lgbt-literature/.

Healey, Trebor. “Early Gay Literature Rediscovered.” Huffington Post, www.huffingtonpost.com/trebor-healey/early-gay-literature-redi_b_5373869.html .

Hill, Mark. “The Forgotten Early History of Fanfiction.” Motherboard, 3 July 2016, motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4xa4wq/the-forgotten-early-history-of-fanfiction.

Hu, Jane. “The Revolutionary Power Of Fanfiction For Queer Youth.” The Establishment, The Establishment, 16 May 2016, theestablishment.co/the-importance-of-fanfiction-for-queer-youth-4ec3e85d7519.

Kneale, Heidi. “Final Staff.” The Appeal of Fanfiction, July 2005, www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10165.

Knorr, Caroline. “Inside the Racy, Nerdy World of Fanfiction.” CNN, Cable News Network, 5 July 2017, www.cnn.com/2017/07/05/health/kids-teens-fanfiction-partner/index.html.

Kovach, Catherine. “7 Authors Who Wrote Fanfiction.” Bustle, Bustle, 20 Mar. 2018, www.bustle.com/articles/160939-7-authors-who-wrote-fanfiction-because-its-actually-the-best.

“List of Literary Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice.” List of Literary Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/List_of_literary_adaptations_of_Pride_and_Prejudice.html.

McQuein, Josin L. “My Bloggish Blog Thing.” Novels vs. Fanfiction, 18 Apr. 2012, 12:53 PM, josinlmcquein.blogspot.com/2012/04/novels-vs-fanfiction.html.

Morrison, Ewan. “In the Beginning, There Was Fan Fiction: from the Four Gospels to Fifty Shades.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 13 Aug. 2012, www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/13/fan-fiction-fifty-shades-grey.

OBrien, David. “Famous Authors Who Began in Fan Fiction.” AUTHORS.me, 27 Oct. 2016, www.authors.me/famous-authors-began-fan-fiction/.

Pellegrini, Nicole. “FanFiction.Net vs. Archive of Our Own.” HobbyLark, HobbyLark, 15 Feb. 2017, letterpile.com/writing/fanfictionnet-vs-archive-of-our-own.

Romano, Aja. “10 Famous Authors Who Write Fanfiction.” The Daily Dot, 9 Mar. 2017, www.dailydot.com/parsec/10-famous-authors-fanfiction/.

Romano, Aja. “Is It Possible to Quantify Fandom? Here's One Statistician Who's Crunching the Numbers |.” The Daily Dot, 24 Feb. 2017, www.dailydot.com/parsec/toastystats-ao3-fandom-statistics/.

Sarner, Lauren. “This 'Harry Potter' Fan Fiction Author Adapated Dramione Into A Novel.” Inverse, 18 July 2016, www.inverse.com/article/15572-dramione-fandom-harry-potter-fan-fiction-romance-l-stoddard-hancock-broken-wings.

Silver, Farasha. “How Archive of Our Own Revolutionized Fandom.” FAN/FIC Magazine, 26 Mar. 2017, fanslashfic.com/2015/11/01/how-archive-of-our-own-revolutionized-fandom/.

Times, J.E. Reich Tech. “Fanspeak: The Brief Origins Of Fanfiction.” Tech Times, MENU$(".Topsearchbutton").Click(Function(){ $(".Srcframe").Toggle(); }); $('Input[Type="Search"]').Keypress(Function() { $("#Srcform").Submit(); });TechScienceHealthCultureReviewsFeatures, 25 July 2015, www.techtimes.com/articles/70108/20150723/fan-fiction-star-trek-harry-potter-history-of-fan-fiction-shakespeare-roman-mythology-greek-mythology-sherlock-holmes.htm.

#senior paper #fanfiction essay #yes i wrote an essay about fanfiction #educational #informative paper #pls dont judge me

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winteriron-trash · 6 years

Text

About Me/FAQ

Hey, welcome to my blog! This is my -well, usually- Marvel-centric blog that has everything WinterIron, Bucky Barnes, and Tony Stark, as well as some general shitposts of my own wild adventures. I figured it’s best to keep up this trend of updating my ‘About Me’ page every follower milestone. So thank you all so much for over 3,000 followers, I never expected to break that many followers, let alone in less than a year on Tumblr. I appreciate each and everyone one of you, so really, thank you for sticking around with my bullshit.

Per the usual, I don’t do drama, I don’t do discourse. If you have a serious problem with me or anything I’ve written/done on this blog, please take it up with me personally. I will delete anon hate (if I get any, I haven’t gotten any yet…) and I think it’s all just pointless. I can be salty and derpy sometimes, but I will never purposely say something malicious. I’m not here for that negativity.

Now, to the FAQs.

Do you have an Ao3/Pillowfort/other social media?

I do have an Ao3, you can find me at Gothic_Lolita. I don’t cross-post everything, and a lot of my stuff on Ao3 isn’t WinterIron or even Bucky or Tony-centric, so if you’d like to see some other stuff I write, feel free to check over there. I don’t have a Pillowfort, nor do I plan on getting one. It took me forever to get this platform right, I’m not in the place to bother learning how to navigate a new one. I don’t do Snapchat or Instagram or Twitter because I am not nearly basic or cool enough for that stuff. The only social media I use is Tumblr and Pinterest, and trust me, my Pinterest is nothing interesting enough to be worth linking.

Do you have a tagging system?

I’m… trying, honestly. I’m trying to adjust my tags and systems because of the… wildness Tumblr is having with blocking and purging certain tags. I try to be funny in my tags, and I swear a lot, and apparently ‘fuck’ is being filtered out of the tag search, so that’s fun and completely screwed me over. As it stands, the important tags are ‘winteriron-trash writes’ (my writing tag), ‘shitposting with becca’ (any wild shitposts of my own sad creation), ‘not about marvel’ (any posts that are my general bullshittery and not Marvel related), ‘becca gives mediocre writing advice’ (a new tag I’m trying to use that’ll tag any post that I give writing advice on), ‘becca spills the tea’ (a tag for whenever I post my metas or opinions on Marvel characters, plots, etc), and the citrus scale which I explain in a post here

Do you write original fiction?

Yes, but I rarely, if ever, post it. I think I have all of one poem on Tumblr, any absolutely nothing original on Ao3. I write original works all the time, especially poetry and novels, but I’m super shy about being vulnerable and putting my stuff out there. I do wanna post my original writing somehow, but considering a fandom blog and Ao3 aren’t really the place for it, I’ll just keep it all hidden inside of me, and one day I’ll die. You’re more than welcome to ask me about any of my original writings, trust me, I am always willing to ramble about the shit I write, it’s pathetic.

What type of fanfiction do you write?

For this blog, mostly WinterIron fics or gen fics focused on Bucky or Tony. I do write about OT3s on here occasionally, but they usually include WinterIron in some way. Most of the time. I’ve somehow gotten to writing some weird stuff lately, to be honest. I’ll work with MCU, Sony Venom, and Spiderverse characters and canon, with the occasionally comic canon shoved in there. I have occasionally written crossover content with DC characters, but that usually relies on comic versions -or at least my own remixes of them- rather than the DCEU. On my masterlist, you can check out all the things I’ve written!

What are your ships besides WinterIron? NOTPs?

I’ll ship almost anything, and I’m a huge fan of rarepairs/interesting relationships simply to explore the possibilities of it, particularly when they include Bucky or Tony. My top OTPs besides WinterIron are currently Phlint, FalconShield, and BlackPepper. As for NOTPs, I strongly dislike Stucky, Stuckony, Thorki, and Staron for reasons of just not being able to see those characters together romantically. Feel free to send me the wildest rarepair your mind can think of, chances are I’ve probably already thought of it myself so I’d love the chance to ramble about/write for it. I’m a big fan of weird OT3s as well, just see the weird shit on my masterlist.

Are you in any fandoms besides Marvel?

I’m into DC, Star Trek, classic literature, Percy Jackson/HoO/Kane Chronicles, She-Ra, Carmen Sandiego, indie gaming, Supernatural, vulture culture, HYDRA Trash Party, and musicals. Yes, I’m aware I was born to be a geek. Trust me, I’ve grown very used to it.

Do you take prompts?

Honestly, sending me a prompt/headcanon/idea is a shot in the dark. I have prompts sitting in my inbox that has been there for about a year that I’ve been meaning to write. Chances are if you send me a prompt yes I’ve seen it, yes I think it’s lovely, but god I do not have the time. Occasionally a prompt will really grab my eye and I’ll just have to write something for it, but sometimes even that can take months to finish. Don’t be surprised if you send me a prompt and I randomly fill it seven months later. I’m prone to doing so. I love being tagged in existing prompt/headcanon posts and asked to write it (as I have a bad habit of hijacking posts to write stuff for them to begin with…) just know that once again the chances of me writing it are about a 50/50. Also, make sure the OP is okay with you asking me to write it, it’s never my intention to steal someone else’s spotlight, I just want to take cool ideas and throw my two cents in.

Is there anything you won’t write?

Drugs and alcohol are hard nos for me. They’re personal triggers that if you really want to know more about, you can send me an ask or message about. If I’ve listed something as a NOTP, I will not write anything with it. I strongly dislike writing kid fics, mundane AUs, damsel in distress Tony fics, and A/B/O, but I’m willing to work with an idea if it’s good enough. It really depends on the situation.

Do you offer writing advice/reviews?

Yep! I’m down to answer any questions on writing fanfic or just writing in general. I love talking about writing and all that. Seriously, I like talking about writing almost as much as I like talking about Marvel. I’m more than open to reading a few chapters of your fic or book or whatever and telling you my honest thoughts, but I probably won’t have time to read all of it if it’s more than 5k long, because I’m just a busy person. And I will be honest because I want to be helpful. Don’t ask me for my honest opinion if you just want your ego stroked.

Can I ask your opinion on [insert topic here]?

Always. I am always open to sharing my honest opinions, regardless of backlash I’ll receive for it. I’d rather be my honest self online -the one place I can be my honest self- then a fake mask made to please others. Whether it be fandom ships, in-universe meta, or non-fandom related topics, feel free to ask me. I love talking meta, or just general thoughts and opinions on random stuff. Trust me, I’m far too opinionated for my own good. Ask literally anyone who’s met me.

How long have you been writing?

All seventeen years of my sad, sad life. I loved writing stupid little stories when I was a kid, that slowly morphed into shitty “books”, then I went through a poetry phase in junior high, and when I was about 14 I wrote my first fanfiction. I posted my first fanfic when I was 15, and have been posting fanfiction for over a year and a half now. I started Tumblr in late February but didn’t start writing fics here until about March because I am a shy bitch.

Aaaaaaand now for some stupid shit about me you didn’t ask for.

My name is Becca, or Winter, or Dumbass, whatever you prefer, and I’m a dumbfuck 17 yr old lesbian from upstate New York. (The ‘upstate’ part is important. Don’t ask me if I live in NYC. Just don’t.) I’m a junior in high school and planning to study English and Marketing in college, to hopefully become an editor. Hopefully. I’m actually a pretty boring and dumb bitch, which makes it all the more concerning that I am steadily gaining popularity on this hellsite. Someone help me.

I mentioned some of my interests above, but some other stuff I’m into includes knitting, playing piano, tea, collecting (hoarding) notebooks, photography, editing, music, and being a general idiot. I’m a wild child in ripped jeans and a leather jacket, which should not fool you because I’m far too shy and afraid of everything to be cool like that. I sound a lot cooler online because I’ve gotten so used to online interactions from making friends and running my own Discord server, but in real life I am unrecognizable. I’ve been in a grade of 60 people with the same people since kindergarten and some of them still don’t know my name.

I’m mentally ill and all that, but we’re working on getting… better. Writing schedules are a mess from me and sometimes I’m falling apart so, that’s fun. It doesn’t usually affect my blog because I internalize that shit, but occasionally the self-deprecating humor can get to be a little too close to the truth. And just the general spastic nature of my blog reflects the utter chaos of my mind.

So anyway, that’s me, please be my friend. Also, because this seems to come up more and more. Please don’t be afraid of me/intimidated by me. I know I look all cool and popular, but I am literally a hot mess just like the rest of us. If you want to climb your way into my messages and just,,,, scream at me about something you think I’d like, or just scream in general, go ahead. I really won’t mind, I promise. I need… friends, or so my therapist tells me.

Oh, and here’s a face reveal.

Yes, I am that absolute idiot of a person, lying splat in the middle of my elementary playground field for,,,, reasons???? I don’t really remember the story behind that picture tbh, but it’s my entire personality in a single picture, so I dig it.

And here’s my actual face, with a cheap ring in my mouth and a fox filter because I thought I looked cute, okay? Leave me be.

Tadah.

I swear I’m funny and talented sometimes, please like me.

As always, feel free to send me an ask or a message about anything you’d like.

Check out my Masterlist if you want, and join my Discord Server.

#about me #personal #not about Marvel #now you know who i am #updated #3k

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scifrey · 7 years

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Improbable Press put out a call asking fan fiction authors how they went from Free to Fee. Here’s my response. Happy reading!

The Story of How I Started Selling Stories

My parents, teachers, and acting/singing coaches will all tell you that I've always been a story teller. For the first twenty four years of my life, I was determined to do so through musical theatre, though I had always secretly harbored the desire to write a hit stage play. My early writing consisted of plays for my friends and I to put on, interspersed with prose that I supposed would one day become a novel, but which wasn't my passion.

I was a big reader, but where this habit came from, I'm not certain. While my mother always had a book on the go - whatever crumbling paperback law thriller or murder mystery she'd been handed by the woman down the street when she was done it, which was then passed on to the next neighbor - my father and brothers preferred sports (either on TV or outside in the yard) over reading. I stumbled into fantasy and science fiction because Wil Wheaton was hot, and his show was on every Friday night, and from there I consumed every Star Trek tie-in novel my tiny rural library carried, then started following the authors of the novels into their other worlds and series.

So you won't be surprised to learn that this was how I found fan fiction for the first time. My "I love this, gee, I wonder what else there is?" muscle was well developed by junior high, and before the internet had come to The Middle Of Nowhere Rural Ontario, I had already gotten quite adept at search keywords and codexes to track down more books to consume. Imagine my shock and joy when, in the middle of my Phantom of the Opera phase (come on, fess up, you had one too), the internet in my school library told me about not only Fredrick Forsyth and Susan Kay's stunning re-tellings, but of something called fan fiction.

I wasted a lot of the librarian's ink and paper printing out these books and secreting them into binders and pretending to do school work at my desk or backstage between scenes. A lot. And yes, I still have most of them.

And as we all well know, the jump between reading and writing is a short when one is submerged so fully in communities of creators. Everyone else's "What If" rubs off on you, and it's just a matter of time before you find yourself playing with the idea of coaxing a few plot bunnies over to spend some time with you. Not everyone loves to write, but gosh darn it, if you want to give it a try, then you couldn't ask for a better, more supportive community. It doesn't matter how new you are to it, everyone reads, everyone comments, everyone makes suggestions. People beta read. People edit. People co-write. People cheer, and support, and recommend, and enthuse. Yeah, there are the occasional jerks, flammers, and wank-mongers, but on the whole? There's literally no better place to learn how to be a writer than in fandom, I firmly believe this.

So, of course, born storyteller that I am, I had to give it a try.

I started writing fan fiction in 1991 for a small, relatively obscure Canadian/Luxembourg co-pro children’s show called Dracula: the Series. I used to get up and watch it on Saturday mornings, in my PJs, before heading off to whichever rehearsal or read through or practice I had that year.

1995 brought the English dub of Sailor Moon to my life, (and put me on the path to voice acting), and along with a high-school friend, I wrote, printed out, illustrated, and bound my first “book” – a self-insert story that was just over eleven pages long, which introduced new Scouts based on us. From there, I didn’t really stop.

1996 led me to Forever Knight and Dragon Ball Z, and from there to my friend’s basement where they’d just installed the internet. We chatted with strangers on ICQ, joined Yahoo!Groups and Bravenet Chat Boards. (Incidentally, a friend from my DBZ chat group turned out to be a huge DtS fan, too. We wrote a big crossover together which is probably only accessible on the Wayback Machine now. We stayed friends, helped each other through this writing thing, and now she’s Ruthanne Reid, author of the popular Among the Mythos series.) In 2000 I got a fanfiction.net account and never looked back.

In 2001, while in my first year of university for Dramatic Arts, I made my first Real Live fandom friends. We wrote epic-length self-insert fics in Harry Potter and Fushigi Yuugi, cosplayed at conventions (sometimes using the on-campus wardrobe department’s terrifyingly ancient serger), and made fan art and comics in our sketchbooks around studying for our finals and writing essays on critical theory or classical Latin. I was explaining the plot of the next big fic I was going to write to one of them, an older girl who had been my T.A. but loved Interview with the Vampire just as dearly as I, when she said, “You know, this sounds really interesting. Why don’t you strip all the fandom stuff out of the story and just write it as a novel?”

You can do that? was my first thought.

No! I don’t want to! Writing is my fun hobby. What will happen if I try to be a writer and get rejected by everyone and I end up hating it? was my second.

But the seed was planted. Slowly at first, and then at increasingly obsessive pace, I began writing my first novel around an undergrad thesis, fourth-year essays, several other big fanfics that popped me into the cusp of BNF status but never quite over the tine, and then a move to Japan to teach English. From 2002-2007 I wrote about 300 000 words on the novel that I would eventually shut away in my desk drawer and ignore until I published on Wattpad under my pseudonym on a lark. It was messy. It was long. It was self-indulgent and blatantly inspired by Master of Mosquiton, Interview with the Vampire, Forever Knight, and anything written by Tanya Huff, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Charlaine Harris. This was fine for fanfic, but in terms of being comfortable with presenting it to agents and publishing houses, I felt that it wasn’t original enough.

By this time I was teaching overseas, and in my spare time (and boy, was there a lot of spare time while sitting in a Japanese teacher’s office for 40 hours per week when one only actually teaches for 11 of them) I started applying to MA programs (where I eventually wrote my thesis on Mary Sue Fan Fiction). I also spent it researching “How to Get Published”, mostly by Googling it and/or buy/reading the few books on the topic in English I could find at the local book store or order from the just-then-gaining-international traction online bookstore Amazon.

What that research mostly told me was “Write and sell a bunch of short fiction first, so you have proof that a) you can do the work and b) you can finish what you promise you’ll finish and c) you have proof that other people think you’re worth spending money on.”

Short fiction. Huh. Of course we’d studied short stories in school, and I’d even taken a short story writing class in university, though nothing I’d written for the class was indicative of the kinds of stories I preferred to tell. But I felt pretty confident about this whole writing short stories thing… after all, I’d been doing weekly challenges for years. Drabbles. Flashfic. Stories and chapters that were limited to the word count cap that LiveJournal put on its posts. I’d written novellas without knowing that’s what they were called; I’d written whole novels about other people’s characters. All I needed was an idea. Short fiction I could do.

Unfortunately, everything that came to me was fanfic inspired. It frustrated me, because I didn’t want to write a serial-numbers-filed-off story. I wanted to write something original and epic and inspiring. Something just mine. I started and stopped a lot of stories in 2006-2007. I’d been doing NaNoWriMo for years by then, having been introduced to it in undergrad, and I was determined that this would be the year that I wrote something I could shop. Something just mine. Something unique.

While I adored fanfiction, I was convinced that I couldn't make a career on it. What had once been a fun hobby soon because a source of torment. Why could I think of a hundred ways to write a meet-cute between my favorite ships, but come up utterly blank when it came to something new and original and just mine?

It took me a while to realize that my playwriting and short story teachers had been correct when they said that there are no original stories in the world, no way you can tell a tale that someone else hasn’t already tried. The "Man vs." list exists for a reason.

The unique part isn’t your story, it’s your voice. Your lived life, your experiences, your way of forming images and structuring sentences. Your choices about who the narrator character is, and what the POV will be, and how the characters handle the conflict. In that way, every piece of writing ever done is individual and unique, even the fanfic. Because nobody is going to portray that character’s quirk or speech pattern quite like you do, nobody is going to structure your plot or your imagery like you. Because there is only one of you. Only one of me. Even if we're all writing fanfiction, no one's story sounds like anyone else's, or is told like anyone else's.

That is the reality of being a storyteller.

And strangely enough, the woman who opened my eyes to this was a psychic from a psychic fair I attended, who told me that Mark Twain was standing over her shoulder admonishing me to stop fretting and just get something on the page – but to never forget character. My strength, she said that he said, was in creating memorable, well written, well rounded characters. And that my book should focus on that above concerns of plot or pacing.

Well, okay. If Mark Twain says that’s what my strength is, then that’s what my strength is, right? Who am I to argue with the ghost of Mark Freaking Twain?

An accident with a bike and a car on a rice patty left me immobile for six weeks in 2006, and I decided that if I was finally going to write this original short story to sell – especially since I would need income, as the accident made it obvious that I would never be able to dance professionally, and probably would never be able to tread the boards in musicals – now was the perfect time. I was going to stop fighting my fannish training and write.

I cherry picked and combined my favorite aspects of Doctor Who, Stargate: Atlantis, Torchwood, The Farm Show/The Drawer Boy, and my own melancholy experiences with culture shock and liminal-living in a foreign culture, and wrote a novella titled (Back). It was a character study of a woman named Evvie who, through an accident of time travel, meets the future version of her infant daughter Gwen. And realizes she doesn’t like the woman her daughter will become. It was a story about accepting people for who they are, instead of who you wish they would be, and had a strong undercurrent of the turbulence I was going through in trying to figure out my own sexuality and that I wouldn't have the future in performance that I had been working toward since I was four.

Deciding that I would worry about where I would try to publish the story after it had been written, I sat down and wrote what ended up being (at least for me) a pretty standard-length fanfic: 18,762 words. It was only after I had finished the story that I looked up what category that put it in – Novella. Using paying reputable markets, like Duotrope, the Writer’s Digest, MSFV, Absolute Write, SFWA, my local Writer’s Union, Writer Beware, I realized that I had shot myself in the foot.

It seems like nearly nobody publishes novellas anymore. SF/F and Literary Fiction seem to be the last two bastions of the novella, and the competition to get one published is fierce. The markets that accepted SF/F novellas was vanishingly thin I had to do a lot of Googling and digging to figure out who I could submit to with an unagented/unsolicited SF/F novella. If I recall correctly, it was only about ten publications. I built an excel database and filled it with all the info I found.

I put together a query letter and sent it off using my database to guide me. Most of the rejections were kind, and said that the story was good, just too long/too short/ too sci-fi-y/not sci-fi-y enough. Only one market offered on it – for $10 USD. Beggers couldn’t be choosers, even if I had hoped to make a little more than ten bucks, and I accepted.

It was a paid professional publication, and that’s what mattered to me. I had the first entry on my bibliography, and something to point to in my query letters to prove that I was a worthy investment for a publisher/agent.

And energized by this, and now aware that length really does matter, even in online-only publications, I started writing other shorts to pad out my bibliography more.

I tried to tailor these ones to what my research told me the "mainstream industry" and "mainstream audiences" wanted, and those stories? Those were shot down one after the other. I was still writing fanfiction at the time, too, and those stories were doing well, getting lots of positive feedback, so why weren’t my stories?

In 2007 I returned to Canada and Academia, frustrated by my lack of sales, desperate to kick off my publishing career, and feeling a creative void left by having to depart theatre because of my new difficulties walking. I wrote my MA, and decided that if (Back) was the only original story that people liked, then I’d try to expand it into a novel.

Over the course of two years I did my coursework, and read everything there was to read about how to get a book deal, started hanging out in writer’s/author’s groups in Toronto and met some great people who were willing to guide me, and expanded (Back) into the novel Triptych. I kept reminding myself what Mark Twain said – character was my strength, the ability to make the kind of people that other writers wanted to write stories about, a skill I’d honed while writing fanfic. Because that's what we do, isn't it? Sure, we write fix-its and AUs and fusions and finish cancelled shows, and fill in missing scenes, but what we're all really doing is playing with characters, isn't it? Characters draw us to fanfic, and characters keep us there. Characters is what we specialize in.

Fanfic had taught me to work with a beta reader, so I started asking my fic betas if they'd like a go at my original novel. Fellow fanfic writers, can I just say how valuable editors and beta readers in the community are? These are people who do something that I've paid a professional editor thousands of dollars to do for free out of sheer love. Treasure your beta readers, folks. Really.

“It reminds me a lot of fan fiction,” one reader said. “The intense attention to character and their inner life, and the way that the worldbuilding isn’t dumped but sprinkled in an instance at a time, like, you know, a really good AU. I love it.”

Dear Lord. I couldn’t have written a better recommendation or a more flattering description if I’d tried. Mark Twain was right, it seems. And fanfic was the training ground, for me – my apprenticeship in storytelling.

Of course... what Mr. Twain hadn't explained is that character-study novels just don't sell in SF/F. They say Harry Potter was rejected twelve times? HA. I shopped Triptych to both agents and small presses who didn't require you to have an agent to publish with them, and I got 64 rejections. Take that, J.K.

At first the rejection letters were forms and photocopied "no thanks" slips. But every time I got feedback from a publisher or agent, I took it to heart, adjusted the manuscript, edited, tweaked, tweaked, tweaked. Eventually, the rejections started to get more personal. "I loved this character, but I don't know how to sell this book." And "I really enjoyed the read, but it doesn't really fit the rest of our catalogue." And "What if you rewrote the novel to be about the action event that happens before the book even starts, instead of focusing solely on the emotional aftermath?"

In other words - "Stop writing fanfiction." There seemed to be a huge disconnect between what the readership wanted and what the publishing world thought they wanted.

Disheartened, frustrated, and wondering if I was going to have to give up on my dreams of being a professional creative, I attended Ad Astra, a convention in Toronto, in 2009. At a room party, complaining to my author friends that "nobody wanted my gay alien threesome book!" a woman I didn't know asked me about the novel. We chatted, and it turned out she was the acquisitions editor for Dragon Moon Press, and incidentally, also a fan of fan fiction.

I sent her Triptych. She rejected it. I asked why. She gave me a laundry list of reasons. I said, "If I can address these issues and rewrite it, would you be willing to look at it again?" She said yes. She was certain, however, that I wouldn't be able to fix it. I spent the summer rewriting - while making sure to stay true to my original tone of the novel, and writing a character-study fanfiction. I sent it in the fall. I do believe it was Christmas eve when I received the offer of publication.

From there, my little fic-inspired novel was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards and a CBC Bookie, was named one of the best books of 2011 by the Advocate, and garnered a starred review and a place on the Best Books Of The Year at Publishers Weekly.

The award nominations led me to an agent, and further contracts, and even conversations with studio execs. It also made me the target of Requires Only That You Hate, and other cranky, horrible reviewers. But you know what? I've had worse on a forum, and on ff.n, and LJ. It sucked, and it hurt, but if there's one thing fandom has taught me, it's that not everyone is going to love what you do, and not everyone interprets things the same way you do. The only thing we can do is learn from the critique if it's valid and thoughtful, and ignore the screaming hate and bullying. Then you pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and go write something else.

Because a screaming hater? Is not going to ruin my love of storytelling.

But for all that... the day someone made me fan art based on Triptych is one etched in my memory. It means far more to me than any of the emails I ever received inquiring about representation or film rights, or wanting meetings to discuss series.

The lesson I learned from publishing Triptych - now sadly out of print, but we're looking for a new home for it - is that if I chase what the "mainstream" and the "industry" want, I'll never write anything that sells because my heart won't be in it. I have to keep writing like a fanficcer, even if I'm not writing fanfic, if I want to create something that resonates with people. And if it takes time for the publishers and acquiring editors to figure out what I'm doing, and how to sell it, then fine - I have an agent on my side now, and a small growing number of supporters, readers, and editors who love what I do.

Do I still write fanfic? Very, very rarely. I’ve had some pretty demanding contracts and deadlines in the last two years, so I’ve had to pare down my writing to only what’s needed to fulfill my obligations. Doesn’t mean I don’t have ideas for fics constantly.

Sometimes the urge is powerful enough that I do give into it – I wrote To A Stranger, based on Mad Lori’s Performance in a Leading Role Sherlock AU recently, when I should have been writing the second and third novels of The Accidental Turn Series. And even more recently, I cleaned up To A Stranger into something resembling a real screenplay and started shopping it around to film festivals and producers because I love this story, I love what I did with it, and I’m proud of the work. If To A Stranger is only ever a fanfic, that’s fine with me. I poured my heart into it and am so proud of it. But I figure that if there’s one more project I could possibly get into the real world, then why not go for it?

The worst thing the festival heads and producers can say about the work is: “No, thank you.” And being an online writer has taught me not to take the “no, thank you”s personally. Applying the values of Don’t Like Don’t Read or Not My Kink to your publication/agent search makes it much easier to handle the rejections – not every story is for every person.

Maybe once every producer in North America has rejected it, I might think about working with someone to adapt the screenplay into an illustrated comic fanbook? Who knows?

That’s the joy of starting out as a writer in fandom – felixibility, adaptability, creative problem-solving and cross-platform storytelling comes as naturally as breathing to us fan writers. It’s what we do.

You may not think that this is a strength, but trust me, it is. I was never so shocked at an author’s meetup as when I suggested to someone that their “writer’s block” sounded to me like they were telling the story in the wrong format. “I think this is a comic, not a novel,” I’d said. “It sounds so visual. That's why the story is resisting you.” And they stared at me like I suddenly had an extra head and said, “But I’m a novelist.” I said, “No, you’re a writer. Try it.” They never did, as far as I know, and they never finished that book, either.

As fans, our strength isn't just in what we write, or how we come to our stories. It’s also about the physical practice of writing, too. We’re a group of people who have learned to carry notebooks, squeeze in a few hundred words between classes, or when the baby is napping, or during our lunch breaks, or on commute home. This is our hobby, we fit it in around our lives and jobs, and that has taught us the importance of just making time.

We are, on average, more dedicated and constant writers than some of the “novelists” that I’ve met: the folks who wait for inspiration to strike, who quit their day jobs in pursuit of some lofty ideal of having an office and drinking whiskey and walking the quay and waiting for madam muse to grace them, who throw themselves at MFAs and writing retreats, as if it's the attendance that makes them writers and not the work of it.

We fans are career writers. We don’t wait for inspiration to come to us, we chase it down with a butterfly net. We write when and where we can. More than that, we finish things. (Or we have the good sense to know when to abandon something that isn’t working.) We write to deadlines. Self-imposed ones, even.

We write 5k on a weekend for fun, and think NaNoWriMo’s 50k goal and 1667 words per day are a walk in the park. (When I know it terrifies some of the best-selling published authors I hang out with.) Or if we fans don’t write fast, then we know that slow and steady works too, and we’re willing to stick it out until our story is finished, even if it takes years of weekly updates to do so. We have patience, and perseverance, and passion.

This is what being a fanfiction writer has given me. Not only a career as a writer, but tools and a skill-set to write work that other people think is work awarding, adapting, and promoting. And the courage to stick to my guns when it comes to telling the kinds of stories that I want to tell.

This is what being a fanfiction writer gives us.

Aren’t we lucky, fellow fans? Hasn’t our training been spectacular?

J.M. (@scifrey) is a SF/F author, and professional smartypants on AMI Audio’s Live From Studio 5. She’s appeared in podcasts, documentaries, and on television to discuss all things geeky through the lens of academia. Her debut novel TRIPTYCH was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards, nominated for a 2011 CBC Bookie, was named one of The Advocate’s Best Overlooked Books of 2011, and garnered both a starred review and a place among the Best Books of 2011 from Publishers Weekly. Her sophomore novel, an epic-length feminist meta-fantasy THE UNTOLD TALE (Accidental Turn Series #1), debuted to acclaim in 2015 and was followed by THE FORGOTTEN TALE (Accidental Turn Series #2) this past December. FF.N | LJ |AO3| Books | Tumblr

#Improbable Press #Fan Fiction #fanfiction #triptych #j.m. frey #the accidental turn series #free to fee #words for writers

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The Santa Clause: Business Movie Review

The Christmas Movie: The Santa Clause has more than 3 great business strategies for Small Business Owners to apply.

The Santa Clause (1st movie): Business Movie Review

Reviewing this movie will teach Small Business Owners business strategies of Power of Sequence, Resistance, & Believing

The Santa Clause (1994) is a PG movie for the whole family to enjoy and perhaps even discuss some of the life lessons it reveals. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, it’s outstanding! Tim Allen’s character, Scott Calvin is a gem revealing the struggle many people have during the Holidays. Then something unusual begins when Santa Claus falls off the roof of Scott’s home.

This movie addresses some unusual topics for a Christmas movie. I wish I could make every Small Business Owners (SBOs) watch it to observe the power of sequence and belief, denying one’s duties, and the power of following your heart. This movie catches you by surprise. The topic of keeping promises are continuously brought forward. No spoilers here, just some very interesting points to take to heart about choices and their impact! Enjoy watching the movie and learn how to improve YOUR Business Success.

The Santa Clause Business Strategy #1 The Power of Following Sequence

Have you ever bought something that needed some assembly? Did you try to do it your way instead of follow the directions? What happened? Did you have to default to the directions to guide you to your preferred outcome? When you followed the directions you probably accomplished your goal.

In this movie Scott Calvin thinks he can do what he wants – when he wants. Then he’s befuddled when he doesn’t get the results he wants. Scott tries to avoid steps, or do them in the order he wants. He wasn’t following the systems which delivered the results!

How often do you think you can short change a process or avoid a department in your business like accounting or marketing? Probably more often then you’d like to admit – we’ve all done it at times. The key is if we short change the process or sequence of accomplishment, we don’t accomplish what we seek.

The Santa Clause Business Strategy #2 Resistance & The Gifts of Surrendering

Do you resist the inevitable? Even if we aren’t familiar with the movie, we are familiar with the phrase “Resistance is futile” from Star Trek: First Contact. Why does it seem like it’s an older quote? It’s truth.

With almost 15 years of coaching Small Business Owners, I’ve seen resistance be one of the greatest obstacles to overcome for most. When we resist, we don’t step into our possibility of success or potential. Yet, when we release ourselves from the bonds of resistance, we are able to receive all the gifts of surrendering.

Scott Calvin resists change and denies his duties throughout the movie; however, when he surrenders his world literally becomes magical. He, and his family, begin enjoying the many gifts of surrendering. What’s the one thing you can release resisting and step into the gifts of surrendering? I encourage you to do this – Your Business’s Performance and Success Rate will improve significantly!

The Santa Clause Business Strategy #3 Believing Delivers

I have a new quote, “Achievers are Believers”. You’ve heard it plenty times throughout our posts: Right Thoughts coupled with Right Actions delivers YOUR Results. Doubting, shifting a plan, or even hacking a system or protocol minimizes effectiveness. If you don’t believe certain protocols will deliver results – save your money and don’t engage. Save your time. “If you aren’t a believing, you won’t be achieving.”

It wasn’t until Scott Calvin believed, that he found great joy in following the protocols to achieve what appeared impossible. He actually began to enjoy his new profession. Are you enjoying what you do? Are you still caught in your disbeliefs of what is possible?

Isn’t it time to step into your potential instead of sabotaging yourself? Sure it is! Begin this upcoming year with a new way in place to get your preferred results. Believe, follow your heart, do the necessary work, and witness your own miracle!

If you’re saying, “Ooooh, I need to make some changes.” Congratulations! What should you do next? Try this:

If you need help with any of these strategies or other business performance frustrations, just contact Maggie for a 30 minute conversation – either with a call or this link to discuss the gap between where you’re at and where you’d like YOUR Business to be Performing. Don’t worry, it’s not a sales conversation – don’t bring a credit card because it won’t be accepted!

Feel free to share in the comment section which one of the Business Strategies from The Adjustment Bureau (2011) movie would serve YOUR Business best right now?

THANKS FOR ALLOWING ME TO HELP YOU SIMPLIFY YOUR SMALL BUSINESS SUCCESS!

Are you ready to Simplify YOUR Small Business’s Success? Call Maggie (262) 716.7750 for YOUR No-cost Consultation

This Brilliant Breakthroughs Business Movie Review is brought to you by: Master Business Coach & Strategist Maggie Mongan #1 Bestselling Author for the Small Business Sector

Brilliant Breakthroughs, Inc. Site & Blog: www.BrilliantBreakthroughs.com LinkedIn: Maggie Mongan Direct Dial: 262-716-7750

Copyright: This article is copyrighted by Brilliant Breakthroughs, Inc. The internet is about sharing. Please share this post with full attribution to Brilliant Breakthroughs, Inc. at www.BrilliantBreakthroughs.com. Thank you.

#achieving goals #Business Branding #Business Growth #Business Purpose #businesses struggle #motivation #passion supports success

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