FAM #06

[aadler]

The Fanfiction Ask Meme (from cornerofmadness through trobadora through naye through something from Tumblr).

*****

What made you start writing fanfic?
Which of your own fanfics have you re-read the most?
Describe the differences between your first fanfic and your most recent fanfic.
Do you think your style has changed over time? How so?
You’ve posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you’d written it?

Name three stories you found easy to write.

Okay, for this one I already know the answer(s).

1. In 2002, looking at a life that hadn’t turned out for me quite as planned, and watching TV news reports that made it very clear that the U.S. was getting ready to go back into Iraq, I joined the Army Reserve (picking the Reserve because I remembered stories of state governors keeping their National Guard units out of active duty, and I didn’t want anything to prevent me from going to war). I finished my specialty training in December of 2002; by January of 2003 I was on a bus to Fort Bragg with the majority of my Reserve unit. By April we were in Kuwait; on May 1st, the larger Army element to which my team was attached crossed into Iraq.

I had used the spare time (!) from the months in Fort Bragg and Kuwait to finish “Whisper of a Moment”, on which I had been working off-and-on for (probably) years by that point. By the time we left Kuwait, the screen on my laptop had died … and, in the weeks that followed, I learned that I did very well at composing longhand. Every subsequent story I did during my Iraq deployment was handwritten on scavenged paper, and keyed in and prepared for online publication only as opportunity and access to other laptops allowed.

“Perish the Thought” was written out, longhand, while I was sitting in the bombed-out ruins of a Republican Guard fort at … some place. (I was never good at keeping track of my movements, I just wound up wherever the truck under me drove us [“under” because I was always in the turret behind a pintle-mounted light machine gun].) Though I’d had something like that story in mind for a long while, by the time I set out actually to DO it, the writing took a single day. The following day, I went to review the result, and found most of the pages missing; I had failed to secure them properly to the clipboard-portfolio I was using at the time, and the steady desert wind had blown them away. I walked the perimeter fence, and managed to locate perhaps half the missing material; the remainder, I reconstructed from memory in another day. So the story was written in either one day or two, depending on how one chooses to count such things. (I read it aloud to convention attendees at the first WriterCon in Las Vegas in 2004. It made an impression.)

2. For November of 2006, back from a deployment to Afghanistan, I signed up for NaNoWriMo for the first (and only) time. The first day of November, I woke up from a vivid dream and wrote “Icarus” (the only non-Buffyfic in this list, but featuring instead the Man of Steel). That was done in hours instead of a day, but I spent the next couple of days revising and refining it, I never recovered from that distraction to complete (or even attempt the completion of) NaNoWriMo … but the story is still there, and I still love it.

3. During my Afghanistan deployment, I had encountered the remix phenomenon for the first time, and it left a disproportionately powerful impression: nwhepcat’s “the Ballad of Charles Whitman”, which remixed liz_marcs’s “Revelations”. A good ficcer, remixed by a roughly equally-good ficcer, as my first exposure? That was definitely prejudicial as an impression of just what could be accomplished in this form, and I leaped into remixing with a zeal that arguably proved detrimental to my other work. By which I mean, before that point I had turned out 30 Backstage or Independent Buffy stories (plus two Otherfandom, for a total of 32); of the 48 done since then, precisely half have been remix stories. In other words, I’ve done fewer ‘original’ fics in the dozen years since my first remix, than in the first seven years of my pre-remix-aware days.

In June of 2013, my daughter and I were both taking part in the buffy-remix event. I was well into my own submission, but could tell from previous experience of my writing output that the time it would take me to finish what I had started would be more than the time remaining before the remix posting deadline. Though less severely afflicted, sroni was facing a similar situation, so I made a proposition to her: she would write a ‘placeholder’ fic for my assignee, I would do the same thing for hers, and then we would finish our original efforts and each of our assignees would then have two remixes by way of apology from us. sroni expeditiously turned out “I Kissed a Girl (the Scientific Method Remix)” for my original assignee, and for hers I produced “Bitter From the Sweet” in ONE HOUR of writing. It was just there, it came so easily to me that I can’t really give it the respect it might well deserve … but people responded extremely well to it, and in retrospect I can say that in that brief, stripped-down 1,056 words of extemporaneous fill-in-the-blank, I actually accomplished something.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

So there you are. One day. One day. One hour. My three easiest-to-write fics.

Still to come:

Name three stories you found difficult to write.
What’s your ratio of hits to kudos?
What do your fic bookmarks say about you?
What’s a theme that keeps coming up in your writing?
What kind of relationships are you most interested in writing?
For E-rated fic, what are some things your characters keep doing?
Name three favorite characters to write.
You’re applying for the fanfic writer of the year award. What five fanfics do you put in your portfolio?

Comments

[snogged.livejournal.com]

Wow! Thank you for sharing and thank you for your service.

[aadler]

It was as much pleasure as privilege.