janecarnall's Journal

Fortunately, I like writing
Via metafandom:

A Fandom of ONE is not fun. Nor is feeling like a fandom of ONE because everyone else in that fandom clearly does not view it anyway compatible with your views.

The fan who wrote that was born (from her livejournal) about the time I started to write - and the state she calls "Fandom Ennui" I think of as just normal state. It's really neat to be writing fanfic in a fandom where there's lots of activity, and especially if it happens that what I want to write falls into mainstream activity in that fandom.

But, from liking to write Spock/McCoy and Bodie/Cowley to writing RPF in the Keptverse... I just have a habit of not doing that. (The only time I was ever at Escapade, I wandered down the Trek stalls in the dealers' room asking each one "Got any Spock/McCoy"? and they looked at me like I was from a mirror universe.)

It isn't as much fun being a fandom of one. It is sometimes not fun at all being a fan banned from livejournal when no one wants to be fannish off livejournal. (Whine, whine, complain, complain, makes cup of tea, drinks tea, is good. British fans do have tea as a resource.)

But I wouldn't do it if I didn't like it. I like what I'm doing with "The Games": it has plot, it has plan, it has characters who are going to have a lot of fun with each other (for given values of "fun", of course) and best of all, it has me writing instead of procrastinating or reading blogs about the US election. I like writing. It is an intrinsically solitary activity. Sometimes fandom makes it feel less solitary. But mostly, it is an activity that makes me solitary even in a crowd of people I actually like, because when a story is going on well in the back of my head I'm (a) wanting to be somewhere with a keyboard and my characters (b) hearing my characters in the back of my head (c) wanting to tell other people what they're saying, and knowing perfectly well that this is a bad idea.

The only other fan who started writing a story that was about fictional characters got discouraged by

poisontaster declaring that you can't play in her sandbox (ie, not post to her community - of course she's not ruling that fans can't take the shared universe and play with it) if it's not RPS. Which is her privilege: it's her community. But getting discouraged by that would mean (for me) that I was writing a story more because I wanted the feedback from the community than because I wanted to write the story. And a story that's worth writing at all is worth writing for itself. I wrote a 130 000 word novel about Hawkeye and Mulcahy and I think about a dozen people in total read it - but it was worth writing, no matter how few people ever want to read it.

(I'm sort of putting out feelers to see if anyone wants to set up an AU WWK community off LJ, by the way, if anyone who has an IJ account is interested.)

Current Mood: thoughtful