Fandom Snowflake 2019 #8: The Vuvuzela of Self-Recommendations

[silveradept]

In your own space, post self-recs for at least three fanworks that you created.

This is the "for all y'all suffering from Impostor Syndrome, here's your chance to say something nice about yourself" challenge. Because most of us are not Big Name Fans with thousands of kudos to our names on everything that we write, or every chapter that we write. Since I'm still mostly fandom-adjacent rather than specifically In Fandom, at least in my own (likely flawed) opinion, I'm not particularly bothered by the thing where most of my works have small amounts of hits, comments, and kudos. When another person mentioned kudos/hits ratios, I asked what they thought of as a good ratio, and they suggested 1 kudo to every 10 hits on the work.

By that metric, most of my works are not doing well at all. They're more in the range of 1:20 or 1:30. Crushing self-esteem problem, right? My fics are not receiving their accolades, so I can't be all that good of a writer. Except I spent an entire December working off the premise that regardless of what our metrics say, we are good enough to create and do fanwork and talking about the process and the results of writing from that standpoint. I still rather firmly believe that we can create, and that with time and practice, what we create will start to match up with what we believe is good work.

So, in that vein, I'm going to start recommending fanworks that I've created where you can see that process at work. Here we go.

1. December Days: Baseball Tarot is the first December Days series that I did, and it lasted for a few years, since it was specifically only during December Days, and there are 78 cards to walk through to get around the entire deck. Baseball's a big fandom, Tarot readers are a big fandom, and the intersection of the two is a very small sliver of the Venn diagram. More importantly, though, the deck served as a framework for talking about baseball in manageable chunks and that I thought would allow me to put my considerable experience as a player and fan to good use, expanding upon the parts of the game that were present in those cards. Since it happened over the course of three years, though, you can see a shift of how life circumstances (that aren't being talked about) made the interpretations change somewhat as well, and you can eventually see the smoothing of the form into something like a template, sort of, if you squint. It's a work that I'm proud of, even if there's some polish work needed for it to turn it into a fully standalone thing.


2. The long-running giving-of-grief about Pern and its...foibles, on Slacktiverse is probably my biggest fanwork in terms of wordcount. But you can also see shifts over time, from a beginning that was still feeling itself out, to something more polished and regular in posting and in knowing what content it is going to pay attention to in the narrative. Some of that is shaped by the community of the commenters (as was Baseball Tarot above), and some of that is realizing what I really want to talk about with regard to the series. There's not great navigation on getting to and from the next entries, and it's a lot of books that have been gone through, chapter by chapter, but if you are someone who thought Pern was great until you realized the Suck Fairy had set up condos there, this might be helpful. Or at least cathartic to know that you're not alone.


3. Origin Stories is on this list, because it's a progression of stories all in one work, but also because it's the first solely-about-this-work piece on the Archive of Our Own that I could find. An earlier me would have looked at the possibility of being the first one in somewhere like AO3 and blanched heavily. The me that created this was still a bit on edge about doing so, because if you're the first, that means you're shouldering, potentially, the entire burden of whether or not people are going to like the fandom and to continue writing in it. If there was anything to make someone's Impostor Syndrome flare up terribly, this is the thing.
   
   The good part about writing this, though, is that since it was for an exchange, there was a deadline to meet, and I did my level best to do just that, which allowed me to push any thoughts about getting nervous over being the first one in out of my head and post the work itself. I think that represents a pretty significant journey toward being okay with my own work over the last couple years.

If you like what you see, or you want to peruse my other fic works, The AO3 output tag updates on six month intervals, with short commentary attached about the writing process and the things that went in to each work. If you want to get things more directly from the pipeline, you can look at my works on AO3, bookmark them, or subscribe to me or to stories and series themselves.