Fandom Snowflake Challenge, Day 7

[aadler]

Continuing the meme/challenge begun and tracked here.

Fandom Snowflake Challenge, Day 7

Promote/Rec/Sing the Praises of Yourself! Leave a comment here saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Okay. Since I’m compulsive (and have a massive ego), I’m going to break this into three parts.

Promote yourself.

My stories (archived in several areas, but the ones that matter most are at LiveJournal and Archive of Our Own) are all set in the shared world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series, unless specified otherwise, and divided into several major sections:

Backstage Stories.

Inspired by what I’d heard of ‘below decks’ fiction in Star Trek: the Next Generation fandom (though I never actually read any of those), my basic notion in the Backstage series was that these were stories that could be threaded in with canon without contradicting it: filling in empty corners, fleshing out lesser-explored themes, part of that larger Buffyverse without actually changing it. As a result, it’s my boast that I’ve never been jossed (had any major element of my writings made impossible by later developments in the series), which of course became much easier after the series ended; still, I spent three and a half years — four and a half, counting Angel’s last season — writing in that ’verse without being upended.

Queenverse Stories.

Actually still a part of the Backstage series, but in an AU where Cordelia was the Slayer instead of Buffy. How could this be AU and canon-consistent? Because it was recognized as an AU — as was the in-canon universe of “the Wish” — and once only (in “Each Proud Division”) Slayer-Cordelia actually found herself in the ‘canon’ setting and interacting with canon characters.

Independent Stories.

Outside the Backstage setting, and so far all unconnected to each other, the Independent stories are just basic Buffyfics (or occasional mixes of Buffy and Angel, I don’t think there were any pure Angel stories) that tried out different ideas. Very occasionally an Independent story will be internally promoted over to Backstage status (“Long Time Passing” keeps threatening to make the switch), and less frequently a Backstage story will be ‘down’graded to Independent status (I did that with “Voices in the Dark”, and may have done the same with “Jasmine Tears”), but in general they stay where they started.

Drabbles.

They’re just that — drabbles — and so far all set in the Buffyverse. (I had one, long ago, that was done strictly for my kids and set in Smallville fandom, but never found a place for it and eventually learned that the computer where it was stored had been thrown away. Sorry to have lost that.) Several of the drabbles could have been worked in with Backstage, but most are just notions I followed out at random. Also, several are linked-drabble-sets: one with four sets, five with five sets, and two with ten sets. Why? just because I felt like it.

Finally, Otherfandoms.

Stories outside Buffy/Angel. Yes, I’ve done a few crossovers (including some that I call ‘leakovers’ because they were so subtly framed that they weren’t even necessarily recognizable as crossovers), but those were always extra characters snuck into the Buffyverse. The Otherfandom stories are those that aren’t Buffy-linked at all. I’ve only done a few, but I plan to do more, and some of them have some real punch to them.

Rec yourself.

I could do that all day long. Short form: read all my stories. The ones I would currently like to draw attention to, though, are ones that didn’t really get much attention the first time through.

“Shadow and Substance”. Only the third of my Buffyfics, but in many ways the first one that really showed most of the elements that would come to characterize my writing. All the major characters came from canon, but I managed to put my own twist on them, and it was where I really started to take off. It got relatively little response from fandom, I think because it contained none of the major canon characters; and, who knows, maybe because it just isn’t as good as I thought it was. (But I still think it was.)

“the Still, Small Voice”. This was a bit of a personal indulgence, taking characters who had been maligned in canon (and even more in fanon) and doing what I could to draw them out of the straw-man category to which I felt they had been assigned: Tara’s father, and Quentin Travers. I’ve observed elsewhere that I probably would have included Hank Summers in the mix, if I hadn’t already given him a story of his own (“Tip of My Tongue”). Even as an indulgence, though, there was some interesting stuff there.

“Beg to Differ”. This got a LOT of notice when it first appeared, and then things just sort of … died. Maybe it was a bit difficult to classify — it never took any awards, at a time where I was getting awards for a number of stories, because what category would you put it in? — and maybe because the face of fandom, and my own place in it, was beginning to change (this was about a year and a half after the last episode of Angel, so the fandom was of necessity taking on a different cast). Still, I hated to see it vanish after such a promising debut.

Okay, enough of that. Let’s close with “First Do No Harm”. This was recognized, and most people who read it seem to have appreciated it as much as I did. Why this one? because if you’re going to read any aadlerfic, this would probably be the most fun. (And, though not planned at the time, it lent itself to two sequels already, with the foundations laid for a third.)

Praise yourself.

Hey, I’ve been doing the fanfic thing for over 20 years now. I wasn’t remotely the first in the Buffyfic community, but there wouldn’t be very many who started as early and stayed with it this long, in relatively constant production. I’ve participated in multiple events, started one of my own (cof_remix, which will have its tenth round this year), raised my daughter in fanfic, divorced and remarried and gone to war and come back again, all while continuing to crank out stories. I do it because it’s fun, and I’m pretty pleased with what I’ve managed to turn out, and I think it would be perfectly appropriate for people to be impressed by me.

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So, okay. Will that do it?