Thought Bubbles

This was not quite the article I was looking for, but it covers the gist of it. Not having people disagree with and criticize you is bad for you as a person. More importantly, it is also bad for you as a writer.

For example, I know very few people who vote conservatively. Those I know who do are mostly relatives, or not people I discuss politics with on any kind of regular basis. This creates a thought-bubble for me, where everyone I discuss politics with is fairly liberal. This leads to things like blank incomprehension when my favoured party does not win elections. Blank incomprehension is bad, and means I am not paying attention and probably cannot write about the topic effectively.

If I do the same sort of things in writing, that means I will end up mostly with second readers (beta-readers) who agree with me or have a similar style. With similarities in style, they are less likely to notice weaknesses in mine. That would lead to putting inferior work out into the world, which would be terrible.

I am lucky enough to have a fairly wide circle of friends who write and are online a lot. So, when I finished a short story I wanted to post for someone's birthday, only a couple hours before the end of that birthday, it was to the online writer-friends I turned for feedback. Of those people who were on, one flatly refuses to read fanfiction, while another has a hard time with graphic medical things (my story was both fanfiction and graphically medical). Another eschewed fanfiction in general, probably wouldn't object to reading it from me, but has enough antipathy to some of the plot elements that their critique would be more focused on that than on the writing. Another, newly acquired, I hadn't ever seen critique from, so I was not completely sure of it's potential utility. I asked Pat and Theodore to read it, because even though Pat as a rule doesn't read fanfiction, he's fast and can concentrate on technical things, and Theodore is in the same fandom and was able to comment on things like consistent memetics in the story universe.

Both of them had minor issues with something (different somethings). Pat's was based on terrible imagery, and I ended up not taking his advice because the original amused me too much and was also something of a fandom joke. Theodore's was based on consistency, but we discussed it and deemed it plausible given other factors. This disagreement and discussion made me feel more confident in the story, because they both have different approaches to writing than I do, and so if this was the most they could come up with to nitpick, then I was probably doing reasonably well.

Am I still in a thought-bubble as relates to writing? Quite possibly. I am doing my best to ameliorate that, though - which is why comments on the pieces I post on Sundays will always be welcome.

Fanfiction

At the last meeting of the Victoria Writers' Society I attended, I ended up talking to someone a bit about fanfiction and how it can be a great way to re-contextualize a work as well as standing well on its own. It can be, and the Organization for Transformative Works has great information about various authors feelings about fanfiction, legal proceedings related to copyright, fan culture, and recently some interesting stats on the percentages of people who identify as fans who create fanworks.

The fanworks themselves can be utterly amazing, and I gushed at length about a couple in particular. She suggested that she might look some up herself, and, while I have full faith in her ability to find archives of fanfiction on the internet, I have full faith in her ability to find archives of fanfiction on the internet.

Fanfiction is like any other sort of self-published work. Some of the stories are absolute gems written by people who know their craft and get other people to read them over for errors. Some of them are adolescent wish-fulfillment posted before the pixels are dry. As everywhere else, the latter outnumber the former rather spectacularly.

So here is my short, incomplete list of recommendations. These are not necessarily those stories that I love best, but those that I feel both stand alone as literature and are stronger and more interesting because of their context as fanfiction.

First, Strider's Edge, by tumblr user Paratactician

It is the combination of Homestuck by Andrew Hussie, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. It is set in Oxford, and we are informed that most places mentioned in the story map to real places, though names have been changed.

Strider's Edge kicks off with an A. E. Housman poem, the whole of which foreshadows the entire story, and only part of which is included in the text itself. The story itself is difficult to summarize without giving away all the important bits, but the one at the top of the story is "It was a Tuesday late in September when I went up to Oxford University." The story follows the adventures of John Egbert as he grows up, meets new friends, falls in love, and is peripheral witness to several murders. The solving of the murders is not central to the plot.

One of the central themes is that all things are repeated: this is addressed explicitly in one of the interesting conversations about literary constructs that occurs in John's Tutorials sessions, as well as being a central facet of the way the story is presented and integral to the fact that this is fanfiction.

Second, One of Our Submarines, by Luka Grindstaff

It should be no surprise to anyone that one of Luka's stories ended up on this list: I adore Luka's comic Kagerou so much that I am writing fanfiction of it myself.

One of Our Submarines is summarized as "Sollux Captor, recently drafted into the Service of Her Imperious Condescension, discovers a secret community of Helmsmen hidden inside the Imperial communications network. Meanwhile on Alternia, Karkat Vantas is up to his goddamn nook in revolution."


Yes, it makes more sense initially if you have already read Homestuck, which it is a fanfiction of. It is also not complete yet.


One of Our Submarines explores what it would be like to be a sentient and formerly autonomous computer system, the horrors inherent in that transition, and storytelling entirely via chatlog.


Third, General Vantas Gets Hitched, by Jesse Hajicek

I probably link Luka and Jesse entirely more than I should, but I deeply admire both of them as writers.

General Vantas Gets Hitched, whose full title is "General Vantas Gets Hitched, or, The Limits Of Bilateral Diplomacy: A Black Powder Romance," is a deconstruction of the rather silly trope of two men forced into an arranged marriage. This trope is a reasonably recent convention, largely in anime and fanfiction, but this story is also a wider deconstruction of arranged marriage stories in general. It is, as everything else on this list, Homestuck fanfiction, and is summarized as "In which a mutant too famous to cull is dropped like a grenade into the midst of the peace process, a foolish monarch proves himself secretly shrewd, the power of friendship functions as a force multiplier, and it is discovered that in the Great Game of espionage, the dealer does not always win."



It, as One of Our Submarines, is easier to get into as a story if you have read Homestuck. General Vantas Gets Hitched follows the titular General Vantas as he navigates the very alien human culture he finds himself in the midst of.


It is somewhat less an experiment in storytelling than the other two, as well, but where it finds real strength is in the characterization. All of the characters are quite plausible 'what ifs' if the main plot of Homestuck had not disrupted the characters lives the way it has.


Oh, and happy Independence Day, Americans.

Fandom, part two

I don't read Kristen Britain anymore.

Not because I don't like her writing: Green Rider was excellent, First Rider's Call was a delight to discover a couple years later, and The High King's Tomb left me hungering for more in the series.

Because I wanted to know when I could get my hands on the next in the series, I checked out her website. All authors should have websites: especially ones that they update with the release dates of their next books. As I browsed around, looking for extras like Sherwood Smith has on her site (she has maps!), I found Kristen Britain's FAQ, and her response to fan-fiction.

It confused me, at first. Fanfiction does not affect your copyright as the author, since, uh, you created it first, and everything is automatically yours. Most fanwriters will prominently label their works with at least the name of the original work, if not your name, because they want other fans to be able to find it. They label them as fanfiction. Of course, anyone trying to sell fanfiction is doing something illegal and violating your IP and should be reported, but non-commercial fanfiction is generally treated as falling into slim grey fringes of Fair Use.

But that's the legal stuff, and has very little bearing on my decision.

Fanfiction is, at its core, a love letter to the original work. People write it because they can't get enough of the world, they want more, they want to explore an aspect of it that won't be further explored in the text (like someone's ambition to become a pirate which is derailed by plot). Saying that it's all unwelcome seems very much a denial of your fans' emotional investment in your work. Obviously they will never be as connected as you are as the creator, but does that mean no one else is allowed to fall in love with it?

I thought that was king of the point of writing. Kristen Britain's answer to the question of fanfiction struck me as very much a refutation of the validity of fans loving her work. Anne Rice behaved very similarly and was higher-profile, but I stopped reading her for other reasons, so this is prompted by Kristen Britain's stance. From what I've read, we're supposed to buy her stuff, read it, and care about it only as much as necessary for us to buy the next one and not one iota more.