The Years When I Wrote Stuff

So it’s the wake of the year 2022 and as of two months from now it will be two years since I spent a significant amount of time writing anything. I watched The Glass Onion last night and I want to write a mystery so badly that my stomach hurts, but also I want to go home and time travel is not an option. Feel free to skip the introspection but I miss Livejournal, and I thought other people also waiting for a dead year to be buried who have also tried to make stuff during the last eternity might find this a little cathartic.

I spent my morning rereading some stuff I previously wrote, back in college, approximately a decade ago, and it’s... good? In ways that I didn’t expect, given a whole host of personal factors like ten years experience, the fact that some of what I wrote then was fanfic for a very small and insular writing and reading community and not actually fanfic of a property that exists*, and that what I remember as communitywide engagement is an average of five unique commenters per chapter. (*People who never lived on Live Journal: there were several of these sorts of emergent meta fandoms, long before Goncharov. I was in a handful of them. One of them was the Sims 2 legacy challenge community, where there is no canon, everyone is trying to win points on a spreadsheet while playing a completely different game, and people just straight up borrowed each other’s characters to write combination screenshot and text stories about. It was considered flattery to do it if you could write your way out of a paper bag. Or if your forum threads / livejournal entries got enough engagement to be equal to or more ‘popular’ than the original author. Other metafandoms involved sporking [critical reading of another work with jokes worked in], and meta-fanfic like protectors of the plot continuum.) So, what did I have in twenty mumbleteen that let me write, and do it pretty well for my level of skill at the time? 

I was not less depressed: the year that I wrote 48k of cathartic mystery investigation that I still like was not a good one, personally, and the year before it was definitely top three worst. I also wasn’t just astronomically talented at the time: I was concurrently writing a non-fanfic attempt at a novel that has fully earned its position in the mental compost bin. (The physical location is somewhere in a folder within a folder on a thumb drive, probably labeled “junk” and “old junk” respectively.) 

I was not less busy: on top of classes I was writing a thesis that was so bad, the singular time any other living human mentioned they’d read it after I graduated, I blurted out “Oh god WHY?” (I got that job anyway.) In contrast since the beginning of the pandemic I have been unemployed off and on and not exactly super busy otherwise. I may have been doing a less overwhelming amount of the work of living, since I was living in dorms at the time, but... (checks my apartment) I think I’d better not investigate how much work of living is technically getting done around here.  I honestly think the major difference has been community. Don’t get me wrong, I like tumblr. I like twitter too. There is not a lack of people joyfully engaged in making stuff and talking to each other about it on either platform. We are (probably, at least in my case) a little cooler about it too: twitter’s villain of the week and the eternal problem of internet harassment aside, the dominance of short form and mostly public posting has made a lot more people than I remember aware that joining secret locked fandom groups devoted to hating specific members of your community is a bad thing and not a badge of acceptance into the Big Name Fan inner circle. Also, the first time Diane Duane turned up to my livejournal I acted like an embarrassingly star-struck teenager. Given that I was an embarrassingly star-struck teenager and have since managed to have actual conversations with published authors, I think I may have matured some. But with shorter, faster posts, and an internet economy that is increasingly about advertising, and single streams of information, we’ve definitely lost an aspect of the previous writing and fannish community. Not just the ability to off topic chat in a forum or a comments section with days or weeks between replies instead of wading through the discord, or community reading lists instead of reblogs and quote tweets, or spending hours uploading photos and gifs to new third party hosting sites and re-linking them every time free hosting got discontinued. From my perspective here on Tumblr we seem to have lost a huge amount of support for each other’s projects. Let me explain: back in the days of Livejournal there was fandom, meta fandoms, and original work. The three nations lived in harmony until - okay, technically they weren’t three nations, because we were a bunch of individual people doing a bunch of different things and even if you didn’t tag for shit, if you stuck around and commented enough you met other people. You would get invested in one of their projects, or they would get invested in yours. Most importantly, you would talk about things in the comments section. If you went looking for book reviews you would go to the comments for more recommendations. You’d also get arguments between people you’d never met, essays written by someone who appeared to be commenting on the mirrorverse version of the post you’d just read, and a decent number of bots. But you would be at the party talking about your favorite movies, the novel you were writing, and your thesis in the corners with photos of someone’s cat, instead of shouting across the width of the internet. You can still DM people, yes I know. You can still, if you’re too experienced to be embarrassed by being perceived like @seeingteacupsindragons and I, have a loud personal conversation in public via reblogs and tagging other people. It can even be a relatively private conversation if you’re deep enough into twitter replies or you’re only notable to a few dozen or few hundred people who only follow you in case you have more confessions to make about your former feral gremlin exploits back in the years when you wrote things. I can’t imagine writing the usual fandom disclaimer of “don’t own: don’t like don’t read” the way I used to during a spork or analysis. I legitimately once advertised the story that kicked off this round of introspection with “I obviously don’t own [book series we were dissecting to see why we hated it] because if I did you guys wouldn’t love me anymore.” Not just because it’s assuming my audience has strong feelings about me (easy to assume when there are seven of them and they loyally keysmash every chapter,) but because the firehose of social media feels very impersonal. Not on a caring about other people personally level, but on a level where, outside of fandoms, which aren’t built as sturdily as they used to be, it seems a little absurd to assume people care about your ongoing projects.  I’m not saying prior fandom iterations were better. Fandom problems and blog and social media problems have always been the same community building problems dressed up in different posting limits. Human nature has always been that of miscommunication, self interest, and sarcastic asides no matter how low you can sink the stakes. People have always struggled to organize community in the face of corporate censorship, societal bigotry, and Russian government takedown bots.** I’m saying that the things that used to go hand in hand with fandom, like your own oc’s and the ability to spend six months in a fandom and come out with a writing group passionately keysmashing over each other’s original characters and original stories are much, much harder to find than they used to be.  (**The bots are not always russian but false DMCA reports and the other apparatus of modern internet bot problems is not by any means new. And the eventual deathblow of Livejournal was struck by Russia. For more information I’m afraid you’ll have to google it all, due to me failing to locate any of the tumblr posts that filled me in on specifics long after the fact, on the very same day I successfully found my old Livejournal story I had forgotten the time of via a string of related tags. Irony, it turns out, cannot die.) AO3 and tumblr have kept fandom going, arguably stronger than ever, and it’s not like metafandom has died, given that it hasn’t even been two months since a critical mass of tumblr users decided to collaboratively write a summary of a movie based on a pair of bootleg shoes. I’m almost guaranteed to get more “interaction” with this post than my average original story in livejournal days.  But goddamn it, I miss the comments section. I miss replying to people demanding to know what was coming next with cutesy replies like “well you see, next chapter, [redacted] will [spoiler].” I miss having to break five thousand word conversations into multiple comments and the accompanying ability to trade theories and refute assumptions point by point without either flooding the dash or having to shove it all behind a readmore. (I miss customizeable readmores and the ability to put up a summary to click on or make a cryptic comment about the plot. Upon reflection, I don’t miss breaking up comments, I miss having collapsible threads to discuss specific points of speculation.) Most of all, I miss the semi-private space where people overwhelmingly were not shy about saying “hey, this reminds me of some things in my original story, you want to read some?” and where the link you received when you said yes ended either with you giving out a polite comment about the similarity to the original conversation and ‘I might not keep up with it, but good luck!’ or falling madly in love with someone else’s blorbo. I’ve tried to recapture the magic here and elsewhere, but as lovely as most people in writeblr are there is just so much advertising that it hasn’t worked for me, as a vehicle of actually talking to people about writing. Without a word written of the actual story there’s a moodboard and a playlist and a near-constant feeling of talking to yourself in front of a microphone. We all might want to publish this some day: have two paragraphs and an entire tag of endlessly recycled promotional material about the aesthetic. Everything is a pitch contest and the rules of engagement are written down in a completely different post: above all else act professional. Well, professional enough. You can be a clown and you can be a jerk but you cannot just hang out and expect that everyone will get their own turn to talk about their OC’s, regardless of whether you’re seriously hoping to publish or not. I’d love to talk about the process and art of writing again with people I only sort of know, instead of only doing it in DM’s with my oldest friends. I’d love to drag my OC’s out of the metaphorical compost bin and tell you that I don’t currently have a WIP that is anything like ready for public consumption, much less publication, but that if you watched Glass Onion last night and cried over the idea that you can’t have justice for the ones you love and you can’t bring them back but you can damn well be sure their work was not in vain, you’d love them. They’re my children and they’re my self, they live in my brain and they’re in love and better yet they’re best friends who will never, ever loose each other. Whether that’s to the slow diaspora of having to move across the country to make a living or finding that a dumbass billionaire pulled the plug on the liminal space where they gather. They’re part of a family of orphans and outcasts and they’re the spiritual descendants of a lot of people who taught me a lot about community. They know way more than me about how to help the friends who are suffering yet another pointless accident and wring some kind of catharsis out of a world that has not stopped ending in a thousand different ways since before any of us were born, and it’s only partly because one of them can literally do magic. Mostly it’s because when you write for five people who all hated the idea that resistance to the cruelties of the world is pointless even in fiction the exact same way you can actually give them a single webpage where justice exists, the people who are supposed to keep people safe care more about that than maintaining their structural power, and rich assholes who ruin people’s lives are the ones who go to jail. Now if only my perfect, (but not too perfect) darling, useless daughters would bring me a plot so I could actually use the sadness and anger for something. Even if no one ever reads it.

i think about this tweet Every Time i see people scared to write women with flaws bc they think it'll come off as sexist. cannot believe this is nearly a decade old. Ahead Of Its Time.....

I am losing it

It's really fucked up when you treat characters like people and people like characters.

Have a meme because I have no self control

Lucifer just seems like the kinda guy who’d lose his mind over ppl being too hot (our bi short king)

I spent way too much effort on this pls like it ily 🙏

Bonus (radioapple) doodles as always (edit: I. I just realised I forgot Al’s monocle in both doodles. I am dying inside. Why did no one tell me.):

though the movie might be cancelled, yuri on ice will live forever in our hearts. thank you yoi fandom, it's been real ♡

i dont know how to explain it but joining extremely small fandoms with only a few people in them feels like this

You! American fan of foreign or otherwise un-American media! Are you aware of the nuances and cultural differences that are portrayed in that media and have an understanding that you as an outsider looking in should be careful with the lenses you analyze that media in because you have a different perspective that is not catered to?

some people really be out there typing fanfics longer than war and peace in their free time and then going on about their life like it's no big deal. how fucking incredible. like no offense to tolstoy but that was like. his whole job

Danny Phantom, The Show:

geeky kid gets super powers from his parents' weird inventions! now he has to fight a rogue gallery of ghosts... but uh-oh! he still has to keep his grades up, deal with his embarrassing parents, and navigate girl troubles! rap theme song!

Danny Phantom, the Fandom, After 19 Years of Fermentation:

a child dies. but not quite. the inherent tension between life and death. the obsession of the dead for faded remnants of the living. warped green shadows on the walls of a dark laboratory. having to hide your true nature from those who should be your greatest allies. the fear of the monster you could become if you let yourself. being a ghost as a metaphor for the trans experience. a cold breath on the back of your neck in the dead of the night. rap theme song!

Would be asleep right now, but there are Fictional Characters to imagine in emotional situations. You know how it is.

I think people sometimes misunderstand why we come up with such elaborate justifications for shipping two characters together. I don't justify my ships because I feel that I need to; I justify my ships because squinting at the published canon with furrowed brow and asking myself "okay, how exactly would this work?" is my idea of a good time.

Zepotha will never be Goncharov because when it comes down to it, tumblr culture is collaborative, while tiktok culture is merely iterative, and those are not the same thing.

fanfiction writers when a character is remotely non-human

forget about elon musk vs mark zuckerberg. i need to see yoshiki fight elon musk.

update: x japan has released its first single in eight years. to further shade elon musk. this is a thing that happened.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but as a creator -

I am fine with "the audience" -

downloading my fics

printing my fics

copy/pasting or screenshotting my fics

sharing your saved copy of my fics with anyone else who might want them in the unlikely but never impossible case that my fics are no longer available on ao3

making a book of my fic(s) and running your fingers across the pages while lovingly whispering my precioussss

doing these things with anything I create for fandom, such as meta, headcanons, au nonsense like 'texts from the brodinsons,' etc

I am not fine with "the audience"

doing any of the above with the purpose/intent of plagiarizing my work or passing it off as their own in any capacity

feeding my work into ai for any reason whatsoever

Save the fandom things. Preserve the fandom things. Respect the fandom things.

Enjoy the fandom things.