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Nov 24

No more fan fiction for a while

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2015 in My life

I may not be writing fan fiction for much longer – for a while, that is. Lately, I’ve been writing so many fanfics and I suppose nothing can go on forever.

As Natalie Imbruglia puts it ‘ My inspiration has run dry”.

Hopefully, though, I will be writing more original fiction for some time ahead. It’s for the best. A couple of months from now I’ll be tied up with something completely different and I also have so many plans for the near future that will need a lot of effort and a bit of luck to implement.

If I can finish all my planned original writing, I’d be really grateful. I’m guessing I won’t be able to get to work on anything major for several years, so the more I can finish now, the better.

Actually, I’ll be glad if I have time to read.

Sep 22

Swedish or International?

Posted on Tuesday, September 22, 2015 in Writing

I posted in Swedish about this too, because I was hoping I could get the opinions of other Swedes, but I realize that I’m not going to get that many replies, simply because there are very few Swedish people, at least on Booklikes. That’s why I’m going to ask in English too. After all, there’s no reason why English-speaking (and other) people shouldn’t have any opinions about this.

For many years now, I’ve had both a Swedish and an English/international version of my homepages. I want that, because I’m an enthusiastic supporter of people’s own languages, in this case my language Swedish. (I also love English, but I’m guessing my support isn’t really needed for that).

When it comes to my fan fiction page, I have chosen to use the exact same setup on the Swedish one as the international one. That is, each fandom has a page in Swedish, where you can also see what the Swedish name of the fandom is. This may be too much info, but Swedes mixing in English words in their Swedish and not taking the trouble to check what the corresponding word/title/name etc in Swedish is can really drive me up the wall.

On my fan fiction page I have very much fewer Swedish and/or Nordic fandom where I have actually written my fanfic/s in Swedish, instead of in English. So one possibility is to make the Swedish homepage much smaller/less extensive, where the fics are only in Swedish. Though I’m guessing that most people would never even visit there.

So my question is: which is most reasonable? Having a homepage of a similar size, where I link directly to the English fanfics most of the time, or a much smaller one where there are only Swedish/Nordic fandoms and just one link to the index page of the international page?

Sep 3

Slash in ‘conventional’ book publishing

Posted on Thursday, September 3, 2015 in Writing

Speaking of adult stories as I did in my last blog post, it occurred to me that all these years of fan fiction/slash really has had a result on ‘conventional’ book publishing.

When I was a teenager, I found myself inventing slash stories, even though I didn’t know anyone else who did (or read anything like that). Where I lived, in a small town, gay issues weren’t discussed. I’m sure gay people suffered discrimination. I do know that being different, albeit straight, was tough here, but then I suspect this is one of the worst towns in the world. I’m not exaggerating. Anyway, for years I didn’t write my stories down, and if I discussed them with anyone, it was my sister who tends to feel about the same as I do about most things.

Then a little later (early 20’s and so on) I decided that I would write my stories. It was fun but a bit embarrassing, because I couldn’t let anyone read them except my sister. Of course, my first stories were awful (and so was my poetry). Still, I don’t regret doing all this writing, because eventually I did get better (at least I hope so).

One day in the late 1990’s I was chatting on the Star Trek chat room (on about.com – I think the site still exists, but the best before date has long since expired). Someone said ‘if you’re a writer, then you’ll be writing fan fiction too, right’? I was puzzled, because I’d never heard of fan fiction. It struck me as ridiculous and I couldn’t see why people would do it. Then, only a few weeks later, I remembered hey, those kinky stories I dreamed up when I was about 13, those were fan fiction (and slash even!) so why not? After that I spent more than ten years writing, writing, writing. Some original fiction, but mainly fan fiction. Even today, when things are extremely different, I sometimes look at one of my old stories and I’m amazed I wrote such good stories so long ago (sadly, I often encounter a different kind of story that I wiill occasionally delete).

What I was going to get to, eventually, by the time I’ve stopped cheering myself up by reminiscing about my good old fan fiction days, is that all those years when so many other people got used to reading and writing slash stories, eventually resulted in people writing such stories for publication.

Which is so much fun. In the past, especially in older books that I’d had handed down to me, anything gay was almost never mentioned, and if anything was, it was usually as an example of something related to mental illness. That’s why it’s so great to find all kinds of different books, not only romance stories that deal with gay (male) couples.

On the other hand, when gay gets more accepted, you tend to lose the plot device that deals with ‘the shameful secret’. I kind of miss that, even if real life is different and I think it’s great that people no longer have to hide.

Feb 26

Fandom News

Posted on Thursday, February 26, 2015 in Other

I found this site where you can make your own newspaper and had a lot of fun making this fandom newspaper about books, writing, fan fiction and fandom in general. If you’re interested, you can check it out here.

Dec 28

Fan fiction resources

Posted on Sunday, December 28, 2014 in Writing links

Read more here.

Feb 16

AO3 reaches 1 Million Fanworks

Posted on Sunday, February 16, 2014 in Other

AO3

AO3

Aug 7

Kindle Worlds: Do fan fiction writers want to make money?

Posted on Wednesday, August 7, 2013 in Fandomlinks

Read more here.

These women make some interesting points. It’s nice to know that there are other fan fiction writers who are no longer in their teens and who stay with their fandoms over many years.

Mar 15

Torchwood fics again

Posted on Monday, March 15, 2010 in Fandom, Whining

In case anyone missed them the last time, here are my Torchwood fics.

Feb 17

Ratings

Posted on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 in Fandom, Other, Whining

A while back, I posted about ratings. I think I mentioned that I practically never use them for my Swedish stories/fics. We don’t require them (yet anyway), and I really don’t think they’re necessary. In fact, I was amazed when I found out about ratings/warnings, but since I want to be read, naturally I complied.

When I first started writing fan fiction everyone used the MPAA ratings so that’s what I did Then I found that FanFiction.net and FictionPress use the FictionRatings system and I switched to that instead. Having a separate system (quite apart from the legal aspect that I’m not going to go into) for fiction makes sense.

I also made up my own system that I use on my site (in addition to the FR system). It’s very simple, if not very detailed. Green means G and PG/K and K+, Yellow means PG-13/T and Red means R and NC-17 or M and MA respectively.

Yesterday I quite suddenly realized that there’s another system, one specifically for fan fiction. I was amazed. After all, I’ve been into fan fiction for about ten years (how time flies!) and I’d never heard of this before. While I haven’t had time to update my fan fiction site yet (too busy with RL) I will definitely include the Fan Rated Ratings System. I’ll still use the FR system though and still keep a page with the old MPAA ratings as a reference.

So, apparently, even after ten years, there’s something new to learn. Great. In fact the past months or so (which have brought me much personal pain and worry) have at least given me a couple of new fandom-related things to try and by now, use: Dreamwidth and Archive of Our Own. Maybe I should also mention the terrific Fan Wikis (though they aren’t completely new).

Jan 9

I just took the Fan Fiction Personality Test

Posted on Saturday, January 9, 2010 in Fandom

Your result for The Fan Fiction Personality Test…

The Mindgamer

Everything is possible, nothing is ever really over.

Fanfiction is a creative outlet for you. You don’t intentionally write it, it just happens. You find inspiration in several fandoms, but are not obsessed with only one.

You like to explore “what if” situations. What if this character had never made this very choice? What if this event had taken place sooner, never, elsewhere? What if these people had never met?

You are likely to write Alternative Universes, fan seasons or sequels and just follow your (sometimes pretty strange) plot bunnies.

Take The Fan Fiction Personality Test at OkCupid

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