If you haven’t read her books yet, I recommend them highly: They are about the performers and owners and patrons of a glam-as-fuck nightclub in a country where fascists are slowly taking over. This interview contains no spoilers for either book.

How did you get into reading fic?

How does anyone? A friend in middle school printed out a Lord of the Rings fic and showed it to me on the bus. But how I got back into reading fic as an adult… My strong suspicion is it had a lot to do with my roommates at the time, who were avid Tumblfolk and readers and writers of fanfic. Suddenly I was surrounded by adult-type people who were unabashed about linking me to their favorites. I started off with a lot of Super Husbands and Stark Spangled Banner (s/o to silverlance_vine, my gateway drug) and then moved on to some epically long slow burn Johnlock—this was back in the days before we all grew weary and disillusioned with the BBC’s Sherlock.

The details of my return to the fold are sketchy. I just remember that suddenly I was reading fic again. Lots of it. Long ones, too. It was after college, when I was semi-employed and single and sort of depressed and could just spend days lying on a horizontal surface reading slow-burn Inception AUs.

What do you love best about fanfic? (And no copping out and doing louche Billy Crudup about it.)

The good stuff actually feels like it’s about real people, not *~characters*~. Good fanfic does character-building work that the original property failed to complete. Hollywood strives so hard to make things palatable to the widest possible field of money-spenders that it avoids almost any specificity. And specificity, in my opinion, is the key to not just good character but good writing.

Because fic writers are writing for their own joy, or the joy of a particular fandom, they can afford to hone their focus and make choices, which is a luxury the writers on The Avengers aren’t really afforded. A summer blockbuster can’t make choices. Inevitably, choices alienate a portion of your audience. But if you’re writing for free, for yourself, you can do exactly what you want. And that gives the best fics depth. It makes them vibrant and unique.

What are the main fandoms you read in?

So my bookmarks have got a couple of fics each from a smattering of fandoms. I read Brideshead Revisited when I can find it, a little bit of Star Wars: TFA. Hannibal. James Bond. Dorothy Sayers. There’s also this INCREDIBLE Mad Men WIP that I didn’t realize was unfinished until I hit the last bit and realized it wasn’t an ending. Is there any more bitter experience than that? (It’s They Do Look Brighter by hautboist, if you want to torture yourself.)

Okay yes, and MCU. SO. MUCH. MCU. Stucky in particular, but I love a good Tony Stark story. I just…love Tony Stark, okay? He’s a broken mess who’s trying to put himself back together and it manifests in so many amazing ways…

And then, there’s Inception. It’s not one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s fine, whatever. I got zero shipping vibes off any of the characters, didn’t really seek the fic out, and didn’t even realize Arthur/Eames was a thing. But it is a THING and the good stuff is GREAT.

Also reading the fic has kind of made me ship it, because now when I watch Inception I’m like “yes, they are married/banging/smoldering exes/whatever. The subtext is hidden very deeply in the film, but I have read the tie-in novels.”

Do you ever read fic in cases where you’re not familiar with the original property? And if not, have you ever gotten into a book or show or game just because you wanted to read the fic of the thing?

Totally! Well, I totally read the fic even if I don’t know the property. I haven’t really gotten into many properties because of fic, with the exception of Hannibal. Which I also got into because of the suits.

I went back through my bookmarks to answer this question and turned up fics for Stranger Things and Supernatural. Just one or two from each of them, so I wouldn’t call them my main fandoms. But they’re good stories friends have sent me. Familiarity with the property can lend another layer of complexity to a fic, but I’m definitely someone who will read stuff I don’t understand as long as the characters are beautifully drawn and pull me along.

How has reading fanfic influenced your writing? And if you’re willing to, can you name some fics or authors in particular that have influenced you or that you frequently return to?

Okay, so to be fair, I started to pursue writing seriously long before I got back into fanfic, and I was going to say I didn’t think there was fic that had influenced my writing but that’s a god damned spurious lie. When I was in the thick of writing the first draft of Amberlough, I was basically doing nothing but work in a coffee shop, write fiction, scroll through Tumblr, and devour fanfic. Also reading books—like, the nonfiction kind and the published, original characters kind.

Maybe a year went by and I was still working in a coffee shop, Tumbling, writing, and reading. More nonfiction, now, because I had realized nonfiction could improve my writing vastly (this after reading an early draft of Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant and wondering how the hell Seth knew about things ranging from naval battles to brain injuries, before realizing the answer was probably research).

While reading a lot of pop history, I realized the genre is sort of a subset of fan fic, really. If somebody decides to write an entire book about a person or place or event, they’ve got to be really into it. And the enthusiasm (read: obsession) often shows in their writing.

Around this time, I had started collaborating with my dear friend Sam J. Miller on “Making Us Monsters,” a gay epistolary time travel story about WWI trauma and medical experimentation that is essentially RPF. A collaboration facilitated by Tumblr, actually. And by scads of nonfiction about interwar Britain, which led to in-depth, fannish research on Siegfried Sassoon.

In fact, I’m (finally) about to list those fan fic authors whose work influenced me, and I’m going to include some of those nonfiction authors. Y’all are fans, even if you like to cloak your fandom in the weeds of academia and biography.

• D.J. Taylor’s Bright Young People
• Max Egremont’s Siegfried Sassoon
• I’m also going to throw Evelyn Waugh in here, because that man wrote Friend Fic. Seriously. You read Vile Bodies and tell me it’s not a novel-length friend fic, and we will have words.
• I love Speranza’s Brooklyn Boys MCU fics. Who doesn’t? But I got into their writing because of their perfect  Brideshead Revisited fix-it fics: “Sebastian Revisited” and “Elysium.” It wasn’t until much, much later that I read 4 Minute Window, and not until even later that I realized it was the same author. And not until EVEN LATER that I realized they’re a huge deal in fandom. I was just over in my aunt and uncle’s basement reading their niche elegiac post-war epilogues and thinking I’d made an amazing discovery.
• The Steinway!Verse by toomuchplor is my go-to comfort read. It is perhaps my favorite fic of all time. It is #relationshipgoals. It’s also a Commitment. I don’t even know how many words it is. I don’t care. And I will admit that I have not read the whole thing through ever again after reading it the first time. Parts of it are just too painful. But the parts that are soft and sweet and funny are so good that I forgive it the scenes of heart-rending agony.

I just realized that in that enormous chunk of text, I failed to answer the part of this where I say how fanfic has influenced my writing. One of the things it taught me is that readers don’t need nearly half the explanation authors think they need to give. If I can read a story from a fandom I’ve never encountered and catch on to what’s happening, why do I need to give so much exposition in original fiction? As long as the mechanics of the world are clear and the characters have strong motivations, you’ve got me!

Fic taught me to center character and emotional arcs, because those are the hooks that will haul most readers through anything. It taught me compelling stories can be slow, quiet, and strange. It taught me you can write whatever you fucking want and someone out there will love it. And I think it taught me a lot about how not to write sex.

What are some of your favorite tropes?

Hurt/comfort. Domestic fluff. Slow burns, up to a point. AUs, though the coffee shop doesn’t usually do it for me. I love an academic AU: high school, college, conservatory. And…I don’t know if this is a trope, exactly, but when authors ask questions about aspects of the story never addressed in the original property, especially if they’re like, “boring” things. Talky stuff. Reporters and politics and security analysts. The logistics of fantasyland. Aaron Sorkin’s take on the Ministry of Magic. That kind of thing.

Is there a particular fic you’d give to a novice wanting to dip their toe into the fanfic ocean?

Harry Potter seems like a great starting point to me, honestly—most people have read it or seen the films. And there are HP fics of every stripe. Recs from me? If you’re into Harry Potter and like West Wing or In The Thick of It, We Are Young (I’ll Carry You Home Tonight) by Femme (formerly femmequixotic). If you’re into Harry Potter and cozy mysteries and the English aristocracy, Lust over Pendle.

But really I’d say it depends entirely on their fandoms. Like, if someone came to me and said, “I watched Jurassic Park and I want more!” I’d be at a loss. But I might know someone I could ask, “what are the good Jurassic Park fics?” and they’d tell me. Because fandom is big and diverse and generally friendly and everyone wants to share their favorite fics.

Which really just means I’d rec Steinway!Verse, or Ain’t No Grave, or 4-Minute Window, no matter what your fandoms are.

What’s a recent fic you really loved?

None of these are like, posted YESTERDAY, but I recently read and loved Known Associates, by thingswithwings (longlisted for the Tiptree!) and Ain’t No Grave, by spitandvinegar. It also looks like Speranza posted a new fic TODAY (as of writing), so I will be strolling on over to AO3 when I’m done here.

The post Authors in Fandom: An Interview with Lara Elena Donnelly appeared first on Reading the End.

Armistice picks up three years from the close of Amberlough. Cordelia has spent the last three years working for a fragile resistance against the Ospies, whose hold over Unified Gedda has only tightened. Cyril’s sister Lillian has been trapped into service as a press attache, with the threat of losing her son as a motivator. Aristide has sought refuge in the nearby country of Porachis, where he makes movies and drinks too much and makes Gedda look bad for threatening him. All their lives balance on a perpetual knife’s edge, and the release of a movie — of all things — threatens to tip them into chaos.

What an absolute joy for machination-likers this book is. Armistice reads like a middle book in the sense that we have to spend some time catching up with what the characters have been doing; but Donnelly makes this a pleasure. There’s enough history and bitterness among these characters that their conversations are heavy with subtextual barbs (heaven!), and Donnelly’s able to tuck a fair bit of exposition in among all the feelings.

As in Amberlough, the world-building in Armistice is terrific, especially if you are a fan of imaginary politics (I am!). Donnelly opens up a whole new vista of settings and ideas by setting this book in the neighboring country of Porachis. It’s a particularly good choice for a middle book published during the Trump administration, as it’s impossible for our heroes to attain ultimate triumph over the government in Gedda until the final book in the trilogy. Setting Armistice outside of Gedda maintained the high stakes but gave yr correspondent space to breathe through the fascism.

I also refuse to believe that a certain party believed dead is really dead. If this were fanfic they would definitely not be dead. If you die offscreen it doesn’t count. I deserve the angry embittered relieved reunions that will occur if/when this party is found alive, and I am determined to have them. Thank you for your time on this important matter.

I received a copy of Armistice for review consideration. It has a very attractive cover, but this still has not influenced the contents of my review.

The post Review: Armistice, Lara Elena Donnelly appeared first on Reading the End.