Apparently we’re not out of the woods yet. Sorry, Squiders.
I go through these fanfiction binges. They’re quite terrible, and I don’t really get anything else done during them. They’re kind of random. Sometimes it will be because I’ve finished something and either need to wait for the next installment and can’t quite manage it, or because there will be no more installments. Sometimes someone else will mention fanfic or link to a story. Sometimes there’s mentions on social media that pull me in.
This current bout happened on Tumblr. I do not tumble or whatever the appropriate verb is, but I do occasionally read other people’s Tumblrs because that seems to be where fandom has, in general moved to (I am a dinosaur and was active when fandom lived on LJ and haven’t quite managed to bother to make the shift. Not like I ever look at LJ anymore anyway.), and I like to see what people come up with. Anyone, someone linked a novel-length nu!Trek fic, and then I read that, and then I was talking to my writing community about losing time to that, and we got going on fanfic in general, and then we started talking about older fandoms and then I lost a lot more time to rereading some old fanfics that I really enjoyed.
(I don’t normally read multiple fandoms in one binge, but hey.)
Fanfic is kind of interesting. Sometimes you find extremely well-written, well thought out stories that rival the original source material, and sometimes you find stuff that looks like it was written by a 5 year old.
I’ve also noticed that I can only read fanfic for certain fandoms. This reasons for this have long eluded me, as there didn’t seem to be any sort of rhyme or reason to it, but I think I may have finally figured it out. It seems like each fandom has certain types of people who write fic for them, and so the fics tend to be somewhat similar in tone and structure. And the fandoms that have fanfic that I actually read tend to be ones where the fic authors focus on creating new things–new plot, new cultures, new magic, etc.–where they’re not just playing with certain worlds or characters, but actually expanding them.
What about you, Squiders? Fan of fanfic? (Har.) What do you like, and in which fandoms?
And I apologize about the really strange blog post subjects lately. I haven’t finished anything genre lately (though I did finally slog all the way through The House of Seven Gables, which I started around Thanksgiving) and I’m not quite sure how much you guys care about my individual writing projects.
