desireearmfeldt

I’m approaching the first anniversary of my entry into the world of writing fanfic.  On January 17, 2012, I woke up in the morning with an idea for a due South fic and (because my schedule is strangely flexible) sat down to frantically write it.  It was not only fanfic, but a remix of someone else’s fanfic[1].  When I finished my draft, I thought: well, clearly what one does with fanfic is post it.

A scary thought: I’d been lurking on AO3 for about a year, having wandered in via a couple of friends’ LJ posts about Yuletide.  I had fannish friends, and I’d been working my way through the recent AO3 offerings in due South, but I didn’t know the community of people who post there and who would hypothetically read my offering.  I’d never participated in an online community composed of people I hadn’t already met in real life.  I didn’t consider myself a fan and didn’t belong to any fannish communities, online or face to face – but I knew that by posting this fic, I would be leaping blindly into an existing community I didn’t know a lot about.  Not only that, I’d be doing it by offering a sequel to an existing fic by a talented, well-established author, and sure, she had postings giving permission for this sort of thing, but….talk about hubris.

Still, I’d been reading for a year, and now I’d written a fic, and clearly what one does with fics is post them.  So I contacted a real-life friend who I knew wrote fanfic and knew due South and asked her for a) a beta-read and b) advice on not shooting myself in the foot while entering the community.  She graciously provided both, along with c) an AO3 invite.  I posted the story, notified the author whose fic I was remixing, and…then people started reading it.  And commenting on it!  And telling me I should go announce my presence on an LJ community for the relevant fandom.  And announcing my presence themselves.  And talking to me when I started leaving comments on their works.  And offering to beta-read for me[2].

By the end of February, my AO3 account contained 6 1-3K word stories and 2 snippets, three of them remixes of other people’s work, two of them beta-read by strangers I’d met on the internet.  I was watching at least one fannish LJ community, because it was there that I saw an announcement about the launching of fan-flashworks and decided to join up.  I posted my first story that didn’t go straight to AO3 here, for the third challenge, at the end of February.

As I approach the anniversary of my first posted fanfic, I have…well, counting is a little complicated, but let’s call it more than 75 posted fics, ranging in length from 100 to 45,000 words, in 7 fandoms[3] .  One of them is a collaboration with someone I’ve never met in real life and had only interacted with through AO3 comments before we embarked on the project.  I’ve participated in four gift exchanges this year.  I’m now engaged in writing porn with a stranger I met on the internet.  We’re not strangers any more, of course.  I just like saying it that way because I’m still new to this whole meeting-people-online thing and it bemuses me to reflect on how far I’ve come in the past year.  I have a list of works-in-progress and ideas-to-write-someday longer than my arm.  I have a body of work and a regular audience (!!).  Seriously, there are people out there who regularly read my stuff.  I know because they leave comments telling me so.  How strange and wonderful is that?[4]

It’s certainly not anything I envisioned when I wrote that first story more or less on a whim and decided to post it because that’s what people do with their fic.

I’m still kind of astonished to be here, but here I clearly am, and here I’m clearly planning to stay for the foreseeable future.  So, to those who were here before me: thanks for making this playground and inviting me to play with you.  And to those who arrived after me (there are newer-comers than me! how strange is that?): welcome.