silveradept | Write Every Day: 16 August 02019

Greetings! This is the Write Every Day Check-in post for 16 August 02019.

alexseanchai introduced me to Alexandra Rowland's post on how fanworks have become significantly less shameful for everyone over the last few years. It's no longer a standard practice to expunge the entirety of someone's fanworks when they become a published / licensed / official creator. Some creators have been queried by agents because those agents were looking for lost works or chapters of fanworks. Some have filed the serial numbers off their fanworks and turned them into bestselling wonders. And more than a few authors have commented that when they get done writing their canon, they're going to really enjoy curling up by the fireside and diving into the fanworks that have been created of their characters.

Ultimately, though, the piece is about shame, and the ways that it gets deployed, usually by cis men who profess a love of the original, against fanworks as if they are shameful by their nature as amateur creations using other people's characters, twisting stories and contexts and canons to create something more in line with the creator's vision, instead of the canonical one. It can be cringe-worthy, sure, but it can also be sublime and transformative. It can be an excuse to create smut, but it can also be the in-depth courtship and emotional journey that bring people together.

Fanworks are as good as professional ones. Which works both in thinking about the best fanworks you have consumed and how they could easily stand with the professionals, and in thinking about the worst canons and works you've consumed, where you think that the monkeys with a typewriter/MSPaint/etc. could have done a much better job with this story and its characters.

What's changed is that now that we have an easy way of communicating with like-minded folk across vast distance nearly instantaneously (and we don't have to figure out how to produce and ship zines about if we don't want to) and so it's very easy to build a community of people who aren't ashamed of what they're doing, and who encourage other people not to be ashamed of it, either. Whether by exchange, or just by asking them to write every day, or any other method, the creative potential that might otherwise have been kept hidden and only brought out at conventions can flourish. (And be eaten by trolls and antis, too. As technology advances, the ways people will use that technology to be shitheads to each other advances as well.)

Since I'm turning a chapter plot over in my head right now on my WIP, I devoted today's writing to the Giving of Grief, slogging ahead with a chapter where there's a good thing, in that the BIG TWIST of the last book has been revealed, so the narrative can have a freer hand in describing the same thing in this book, but it's still frustrating because now there's even more evidence of something happening on the page, but the characters, who really should know the symptoms, are still going on as if it's a mystery to them what's happening. Apparently, I really dislike a narrative device where a person with requisite expertise and knowledge doesn't ping to something that's in their expertise. I'm okay with them being ultimately wrong about it, or something being different enough, but I really don't like the "we'll ignore this thing or treat it as a black box" when they know damn well how to investigate it.

People who have checked in with writing on Day 1:

alexcat,

alexseanchai,

athaia,

auroracloud,

carenejeans,

chanter1944,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

lferion,

magnetic_pole,

sanguinity,

shopfront,