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I ramble about writing (and traverse unexpected territory)
Writing has always been a central part of my life and even my identity, even when I didn't practice it regularly. It's been a background goal for me to become a writer even though all the other ambitions that I've had and discarded. Eventually I had to make a hard decision and I decided to pursue writing as a profession and career, not a hobby. I still have a day job, obviously. And I still hobby write (fanfiction, and other things). But the goal is to write professionally.
Writing is a frequently frustrating occupation. It's hard work, and it's work that's often undervalued, sometimes even as it's in demand. As most fanfic writers have noticed. Still I've had some amazing writerly moments in my life, outside of the aspiration to go pro and alongside some bitter disappointments (in myself and in others). I wanted to write a lot about those, since one of them happened just recently and since I could always use a morale boost to my creativity.
As I was going on a quest, rereading some of my own old fanfic, I dove into the bottomless ocean that is my unread notifications and discovered a kudos alert email. I get a whole bunch of those and they always cheer me up, even if I don't always read them right away. This one, though, was for someone who had gone through my AO3 and kudos'ed almost every* piece of original material I had up. At this point, "original work" is the #1 single fandom on my AO3 account, so.
That's six Twine games and three short stories, and someone not only binge-read them all, but took the time to leave a kudos. Now, I can easily undermine myself and say, oh, they could've clicked the kudos button without having read or played them all, but you know, fuck that.
Anyway.
"Can you explain why you're terrified of reading AO3 comments, Hazel?"
Fucked if I know. I get a lot of really positive comments on AO3. For certain values of a lot, naturally, but they are overwhelmingly positive, and most of them *not* begging me to continue one-shots that are years old. You'd think I'd be ecstatic every time I see the words "[AO3] Comment on..." appear on my phone notifications. You'd think. Maybe it's the fact that they are compliments that bothers me? I honestly don't know. Maybe it's just because a comment turns a story into a conversation, and that lights up my social anxiety. Conversations carry expectations, after all, and I've always been unaccountably nervous about people *expecting* things from me.
But I get a lot of positive feedback, even on stories that I'm super nervous about, and especially on gift stories. I'm a good gift-giver but a lousy recipient, as I've mentioned more than once. And so I'm not signing up for Yuletide this year, even though I got amazingly generous comments both on my LLTQ fic of 2016 and on the bizarre, off-putting Neverending Story A/U fic I posted for 2015 -- my very first Yuletide. I'm honestly not sure sometimes why people cut me so much slack when I take big story ideas and try to jam them into as few words as possible.
This ramble started out positively...
A few years back, when I was still in Dragon Age fandom, I wrote a story in response to a kmeme prompt that I later described to a close friend as being "the reason I write". That is, I said that with that particular story -- and the response it got from the original prompter -- I had fulfilled my basic goal as a writer, at least once. I wrote something -- 3K words about elves and mages, FFS -- that had actually made a difference in someone else's life. Not a big, world-saving thing, just me sharing my experiences from the early phases of my disease with someone who'd been diagnosed more recently. Hashtag own voices if you will, and still the only thing I've really written *about* my arthritis, even if the experience I described doesn't match my personal one 1-1. I think what I actually said then was that "if I died now, at least I would know that I did something meaningful". I try to hang onto that feeling.
Shit, if I'm a crap fan sometimes, it's mainly because I'm more of a writer than a human.
So I wrote 3K+ words about being an epic hero who develops a chronic illness. And almost 3K words about needing to save the world but not being able to get out of bed or even brush you hair, still the best depression rep I've let out from under my typing fingers. And almost 8K on golems and the experience of being Jewish in fandom, however indirectly. And a little less than 3K of an ugly, scarred, damaged, unlikable romantic heroine who still deserves to be loved, which I would put myself to hot irons to pry out of myself in original fic form.
Fanfic if a love-hate thing with me. Not that I both love and hate fanfic, because I mostly overwhelmingly love it. More when it comes to myself, as a writer of fan versus original material. I can see the pattern, finally. I can see how fanfic lets me write things that I can never manage to even approach in original material, even from as simple a thing as how much ship fic I write versus how hard it is for me to approach romance in original stories. And, okay, full disclosure, like a lot of other fanfic writers it's *partly* because fan writing absolves me of a lot of the worldbuilding, plot building, and big picture writing, and lets me focus on the small-scale emotional moments that let me shine.
But something else. The thought of writing an original arthritic character makes me feel... I haven't fully examined it yet. Something not-good. A feeling that I don't know if I can power through. I'm trying! I tried breaking past my own boundaries last NaNo, relying on the stress of a deadline to motivate me. I didn't do half-bad, even if I didn't get a workable manuscript out of it. And I'll try again this NaNo, barring some unusual obstacle popping up between now and then. This time, the disabled character will be explicitly the protagonist. That will either make it easier or much, *much* harder.
Only one way to find out which.
*Every non-COTD piece.
*glances up* What the fuck am I even talking about, who can even tell.
(actual playlist I was listening to when I was writing this.)
Writing is a frequently frustrating occupation. It's hard work, and it's work that's often undervalued, sometimes even as it's in demand. As most fanfic writers have noticed. Still I've had some amazing writerly moments in my life, outside of the aspiration to go pro and alongside some bitter disappointments (in myself and in others). I wanted to write a lot about those, since one of them happened just recently and since I could always use a morale boost to my creativity.
As I was going on a quest, rereading some of my own old fanfic, I dove into the bottomless ocean that is my unread notifications and discovered a kudos alert email. I get a whole bunch of those and they always cheer me up, even if I don't always read them right away. This one, though, was for someone who had gone through my AO3 and kudos'ed almost every* piece of original material I had up. At this point, "original work" is the #1 single fandom on my AO3 account, so.
That's six Twine games and three short stories, and someone not only binge-read them all, but took the time to leave a kudos. Now, I can easily undermine myself and say, oh, they could've clicked the kudos button without having read or played them all, but you know, fuck that.
Anyway.
"Can you explain why you're terrified of reading AO3 comments, Hazel?"
Fucked if I know. I get a lot of really positive comments on AO3. For certain values of a lot, naturally, but they are overwhelmingly positive, and most of them *not* begging me to continue one-shots that are years old. You'd think I'd be ecstatic every time I see the words "[AO3] Comment on..." appear on my phone notifications. You'd think. Maybe it's the fact that they are compliments that bothers me? I honestly don't know. Maybe it's just because a comment turns a story into a conversation, and that lights up my social anxiety. Conversations carry expectations, after all, and I've always been unaccountably nervous about people *expecting* things from me.
But I get a lot of positive feedback, even on stories that I'm super nervous about, and especially on gift stories. I'm a good gift-giver but a lousy recipient, as I've mentioned more than once. And so I'm not signing up for Yuletide this year, even though I got amazingly generous comments both on my LLTQ fic of 2016 and on the bizarre, off-putting Neverending Story A/U fic I posted for 2015 -- my very first Yuletide. I'm honestly not sure sometimes why people cut me so much slack when I take big story ideas and try to jam them into as few words as possible.
This ramble started out positively...
A few years back, when I was still in Dragon Age fandom, I wrote a story in response to a kmeme prompt that I later described to a close friend as being "the reason I write". That is, I said that with that particular story -- and the response it got from the original prompter -- I had fulfilled my basic goal as a writer, at least once. I wrote something -- 3K words about elves and mages, FFS -- that had actually made a difference in someone else's life. Not a big, world-saving thing, just me sharing my experiences from the early phases of my disease with someone who'd been diagnosed more recently. Hashtag own voices if you will, and still the only thing I've really written *about* my arthritis, even if the experience I described doesn't match my personal one 1-1. I think what I actually said then was that "if I died now, at least I would know that I did something meaningful". I try to hang onto that feeling.
Shit, if I'm a crap fan sometimes, it's mainly because I'm more of a writer than a human.
So I wrote 3K+ words about being an epic hero who develops a chronic illness. And almost 3K words about needing to save the world but not being able to get out of bed or even brush you hair, still the best depression rep I've let out from under my typing fingers. And almost 8K on golems and the experience of being Jewish in fandom, however indirectly. And a little less than 3K of an ugly, scarred, damaged, unlikable romantic heroine who still deserves to be loved, which I would put myself to hot irons to pry out of myself in original fic form.
Fanfic if a love-hate thing with me. Not that I both love and hate fanfic, because I mostly overwhelmingly love it. More when it comes to myself, as a writer of fan versus original material. I can see the pattern, finally. I can see how fanfic lets me write things that I can never manage to even approach in original material, even from as simple a thing as how much ship fic I write versus how hard it is for me to approach romance in original stories. And, okay, full disclosure, like a lot of other fanfic writers it's *partly* because fan writing absolves me of a lot of the worldbuilding, plot building, and big picture writing, and lets me focus on the small-scale emotional moments that let me shine.
But something else. The thought of writing an original arthritic character makes me feel... I haven't fully examined it yet. Something not-good. A feeling that I don't know if I can power through. I'm trying! I tried breaking past my own boundaries last NaNo, relying on the stress of a deadline to motivate me. I didn't do half-bad, even if I didn't get a workable manuscript out of it. And I'll try again this NaNo, barring some unusual obstacle popping up between now and then. This time, the disabled character will be explicitly the protagonist. That will either make it easier or much, *much* harder.
Only one way to find out which.
*Every non-COTD piece.
*glances up* What the fuck am I even talking about, who can even tell.
(actual playlist I was listening to when I was writing this.)