How did you get into reading/writing fic? What were your earliest fandoms, and what’s the newest one you’ve fallen for?

I first found online fandom when I was teaching Buffy as a TA for seven discussion sections and I got desperate (that is a lot of discussions). I got into reading Buffy fic a couple of years later, only after several failed attempts at looking for fic and really not enjoying it, by which I mean feeling scarred for life. I didn’t like it when the characters didn’t sound like the show and I honestly had no idea what I was looking at. One night I was bored to tears in the ER, and I finally found one I liked, and, Dear Reader, the rest was history.

So with fic, first it was Buffy and then out into the Whedonverse. I very selectively (remembering the scarring) ventured into certain beloved fandoms of my youth (though back then I wouldn’t have called it fandom), like Star Wars, some comic books, X-Files, Sherlock Holmes, and The Breakfast Club. Soon enough, I had read every single Veronica Mars fic. I have a distinct memory of researching in the French national library, getting an update on a Bones fic I was following, and looking it up in the reading room.

Recently, I am very carefully reading both new and old Veronica Mars fic. FOR REASONS. Mostly these days, I find secret old dead fandoms and read in them and tell no one. I don’t really like to weigh in as me in fandom arguments or conflicts (because of the professor thing), and I don’t really like having a hidden identity for that kind of thing, either, as it seems a bit disingenuous (for a pen-name, it seems different). But also, it has been a while since a current fic fandom really grabbed me. Probably the last one was Hannibal.

How has fic (reading or writing it!) influenced your professional work?

I began incorporating fanfic into my teaching in various ways from around 2007, a couple of years after I had started reading and writing it. I was very interested in the different ways fic could present narrative structure, genre, character, and frankly presented these very different forms that many people were writing and reading but people like me were considering. And of course I began considering issues of authorship, originality, and even literary history from a very different perspective.

Writing Fic changed my career pretty dramatically because I became a visible expert at a time when a lot of people in the media suddenly wanted an expert. So now fan studies is a big part of my career—but my most recent critical book was on Kafka and Czech culture, and that was a lot closer to my training.

When I started out, writing fanfic was more of a pure pleasure—I loved to try to have a completely different voice, to sound like someone else and adopt their concerns, to push back a little on elements I hadn’t liked. And in a profession where “publish or perish” is such a big deal and everything is tallied through a lens of accomplishment and prestige, I was thrilled to write completely outside that economy. To “waste time” felt like a kind of chocolate. I had studied fiction (and poetry) writing in New York and at Princeton and I kind of lost the joy of it, didn’t like the publishing industry (interned in publishing), and wrote poems destined only for my sock drawer. Fanfic was a very different mode, and I valued that about it.

But then I wrote 200K words of Breakfast Club fanfic, and then I wrote a novel, In Between Days, that is in many ways a Breakfast Club AU or Breakfast Club-critical fix-it fic. So that blended fic and professional, in a way. And I think writing fic made me more willing to publish it myself rather than take it out of the 80s, which is what my agent thought it needed in order to sell it. I don’t blame him at all! I am sure he was right. But I think based on my experiences with fic, I had more faith that someone would hear “John Hughes Noir” or “The Breakfast Club, but with more coke dealers” and think it sounded cool. And I definitely had become less invested in commercial publishing and the kinds of legitimacy it affords. I don’t think it is as much fun.

However, I also have tenure so other material concerns are not as pressing and I probably have cultural legitimacy to spare in some respects.

Are there things that you find fic generally does better than pro writing?

Fanfic can do sex better than pro writing, especially around consent—whether making it sexy or exploring the various ways consent can be dubious through power relations, etc. Of course, fanfic can fail massively at all of that! But when it does it well, I think it does it better. I think it can do a kind of granular emotional level better because readers will tolerate a slower pace. It can represent sexual and gender minorities and neurodiversity and disability better (and fail to represent them! And do a terrible job representing them! Fanfic is very, very big).

But really, fanfic can do so many different things that published fiction cannot, because fanfic can be as long or as short as the writer wants, can start or stop in the middle or at the end. It is much more free, and often more original, for all its various derivativeness.

You literally wrote the book on fanfiction! Did studying fic in a professional context impact how you read it?

I read fic differently for work than I do for pleasure. For example, I think the Omegaverse is one of the most fascinating things fanfic has ever done, and that some of the stories do weird but important political work. But it’s never what I’ll read when I read for myself, because it makes me vaguely nauseous (so many fluids). When reading for work, I’m more analytical, and I’m not just following my bliss or whatever. I’m looking for interesting, and I don’t care as much if I’m invested in the characters or world, because it’s not about me. I’ll be fascinated by something going on in BTS fic when I couldn’t recognize one of their songs.

When I’m reading for myself, I tend to want a particular combination of good writing, intellectual interest, and emotional engagement that’s not so different from what I’ve often read for pleasure. Sometimes I want more of a good thing, and sometimes I want solace or absolute denial of terrible things dumb show writers have done—like any other fic reader. I will read in a fandom where I don’t have emotional investment if the fic is good enough—because then I get the emotional investment. But that is rare for me. It happened with Twilight fanfic, where I never cared even one bit about the books, but some of the fic kept me up all night.

What makes you ship a set of characters together? Or what elements in canon make you want to read or write fic?

Angst plus humor is my OTP. I want a certain kind of friction, banter, tension, angst or conflict, but usually affection underlying those elements. The fiction can be about corpses or curtains—don’t care. Operatic or domestic, all good. A lot are variations on the Holmes/Watson or Kirk/Spock dynamic (or are, you know, those exact ships), and the others are basically variations of Elizabeth/Darcy. Han/Leia, Mulder/Scully, House/Wilson, Logan/Veronica, Spike/Buffy, Will/Hannibal, Merlin/Arthur… I find there is less femslash with these elements, and often it entails a genderswap, but I love it when I find it. Then sometimes there’s a show like Battlestar Galactica where I will read all the ships because they’re all weird and interesting. That’s the rare example where the world is compelling enough to drive fics I’ll want to read. Fantasy can do that, but I’m not a big fantasy reader.

Sometimes a fic fandom will start doing a particular thing very well. For instance, some of the historical fic around Steve Rogers is amazing, so even though I don’t get into any MCU ships, I’ll read that from time to time. MCU can also sometimes produce really entertaining gen or bromance, and I like that. I’m a sucker for bantery gen fic. My Little Pony had some incredibly funny stuff, and I didn’t respond to the canon world at all. I can’t really stomach The Walking Dead but some of the Michonne fic is awesome, so I read that just for the characterization.

When I think, oh look! Here’s something only fic can do!, I do a happy dance. And when someone does something weirdly literary, I squee, like Hannibal-Schopenhauer or Veronica Mars-Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes-Nightmare Before Christmas, Brontë Juvenilia AU, etc, weird Victorian crisis of faith Sherlock AU. That kind of thing makes my English professor heart sing.

Do you have fanfics or fanfic authors that most influenced you, or that you often return to? (Or are there fics that changed how you thought about what fanfic/storytelling in general are capable of?)

TheBlackArrow from the Twilight fandom really changed my understanding of what fic could do—it was a Twilight/Wuthering Heights crossover that I read because the author was one of my first commenters on a fic, and I was intrigued she said it was Twilight, but it didn’t matter if I hadn’t read the books. That was the first time I’d really read a standalone fic and the first time I’d ever read fic that was (although I didn’t know it at the time) so much better than canon. Obviously there are many others! I did write a book…

What are your favorite things about fic as a medium? Are there things about the fic world that you’d like to see changed or improved?

I like the collaborative elements, the fictive worlds, the strange collective relationships among stories and tropes, not just authors.

I wish fanfiction could be better about race. I think you can learn a lot about race from looking at fanfiction, but mostly what we learn is not encouraging. Of course, it would be odd if fanfiction were somehow immune to structural racism. But taken as a whole—and I am not talking about individual writers or stories—fanfiction exposes how entrenched whiteness is in patterns of storytelling, characterization, norms of attractiveness (and, of course, casting, although it doesn’t all come down to that).

Tell me your favorite tropes! What tropes are your catnip, and what tropes do you tend to steer clear of?

Catnip: Enemies to lovers, there is only one bed!, hurt/comfort, huddling for warmth, mutual pining, office/professional tensions, friends to lovers, social media/texting/digital relationships, set in fandom, casefic

Nope: soul mark/soulmate; very underage; omegaverse (unless for science!); daddy kink; feeding; reader insert

Authors in Fandom is an interview series where I talk to professional authors about their backgrounds in fandom and fanfiction. If you have suggestions for traditionally published writers I should talk to, let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter!

The post Authors in Fandom: An Interview with Anne Jamison appeared first on Reading the End.

Anyway, the arranged marriage in Empire of Sand immediately made me think “now here is an author who has been in fandom,” and thus we are back! Once again! Doing an Authors in Fandom interview with the inimitable Tasha Suri. Enjoy!

How did you get into reading/writing fic? What were your earliest fandoms, and what’s the newest one you’ve fallen for?

I got into fandom almost twenty years ago, but I remember exactly how I fell into reading and writing fanfic: I’d become totally obsessed with Sailor Moon and I was googling it when I stumbled on a fanfic and fell in love with it. I started writing my own stuff immediately and flinging it onto the web. I’m pretty sure the first thing I posted was a .txt file Neptune/Uranus fanfic to the long defunct A Sailor Moon Romance/moonromance.net. I was ten.

I feel really old now. Anyway.

Lately, I haven’t really had a fandom, which feels kind of weird, though I still go back and read old favourites. If someone wants to point me to some good Star Trek: Discover fanfic about Georgiou though, I wouldn’t say no.

How has fic (reading or writing it!) influenced your professional work? Are there things that you find fic generally does better than pro writing?

I don’t think my professional work would exist without fanfic. Fandom is an amazing place to learn how to write, because other fans are so hugely supportive. I wrote a lot of bad stuff and a lot of stuff that was better, and all the way through other fans cheered me on.

Fanfic does relationships really, really well. I’m not sure I want to say it does relationships better than pro fic, because I think pro fiction and fanfic have different audiences and purposes. But that edge-of-your-seat, breathless feeling good fanfic gives you? It’s special.

And if you’ve written fic in the past: What have you found to be different about writing fanfiction vs pro fiction?

Fanfic was 100% a labour of love for me: love of writing, of the source material/canon, and of fandom itself. The more you engage with fandom the more it gives you the energy to keep on writing. Pro fiction is a lot lonelier, at least at first. You don’t have that same community around you, unless you actively build one, and rejection is built into the process of publication. You have to churn all that love and excitement up in yourself without the impetus of a fandom. It was only when I decided to be a fandom of one for my own stuff that I was able to finish any pro fiction, honestly.

What makes you ship a set of characters together? Or what elements in canon make you want to read or write fic?

I love shipping characters who have conflict. I’m a sucker for it. I don’t necessarily mean hero/villain, but I like when there’s something thorny in the relationship between two people that fanfic has to unravel for a romance between Character A and Character B to work. Do two characters have animosity, a tragic history, conflicting missions or secrets? I’m there, cheering them on.

Do you have fanfics or fanfic authors that most influenced you, or that you often return to? (I remember you saying that some fics should be counted as modern classics – tell me some!)

I’m not sure how much they’ve directly influenced my own writing, but these are all fanfics I’ve read over and over again for years. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if they’re modern classics, though I do think at least some of them are!

Truth and Measure is an alternate universe The Devil Wears Prada fic that asks: what would have happened if Andy Sachs hadn’t quit her job and left Miranda Priestly in Paris? I started it reluctantly then fell deep in love with it. It’s a properly epic love story that takes canon and runs with it, winning you over like only the best fanfic can. The sequel The Parting Glass is also wonderful.

If you like your fic a little more meta, then Steve Rogers at 100: Celebrating Captain America on Film is hysterical. United States v. Barnes, 617 F. Supp. 2d 143 (D.D.C. 2015) is no comedy, but it tells a heartfelt story through constructed social media and news items.

I’m also a big fan of a bunch of DC and Superman-related fic and I could read Reconcilable Differences over and over again.

What are your favorite things about fic as a medium? Are there things about the fic world that you’d like to see changed or improved?

Honestly? My favourite thing about fanfic is that it looks at a piece of media and says ‘this is mine now, and I’m going to explore the bits of it that the author won’t’. It’s transgressive and transformative and both an act of love and rebellion. What’s better than that?

The one thing that always used to sadden me about the fic world was how easily fanfics could be lost. There are so many fics I’ve read that are gone forever, thanks to websites going down, fanfics being intentionally deleted by their authors, or sites being purged. But Archive of Our Own has fixed that issue by providing an archive for fanfic and also creating a system for orphaning works, and I’m so thankful for that.

Tell me your favorite tropes! What tropes are your catnip, and what tropes do you tend to steer clear of? (I admit I am not typically a fan of arranged marriage stories, but Empire of Sand made me love it, dammit.)

I love soul bond fics! Love ‘em. Also stories where characters have to fake a marriage or relationship. The arranged marriage trope is my absolute favourite, of course. Maybe that’s obvious in Empire of Sand, haha.

I’m one of the few people in the world that hates coffee shop AUs. I just don’t get it. Otherwise, I’ll read pretty much any trope, I’m a trope omnivore.

Tasha Suri was born in Harrow, North-West London. She studied English and Creative Writing at Warwick University, and now lives in London where she works as a librarian. To no one’s surprise, she owns a cat. A love of period Bollywood films, history and mythology led her to begin writing South Asian influenced fantasy.

Tasha hangs out on Twitter, Instagram and has a Newsletter.

The post Authors in Fandom: An Interview with Tasha Suri appeared first on Reading the End.

How did you get into reading fic? What were the first fandoms you read in, and what’s the newest one you’ve fallen for?

My first fandom was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that was back when fic was mainly shared on message boards and list serves and sometimes literally just email that got forwarded around. I don’t think even live journal was a thing in 1998. Then I mostly lapsed out of fandom except for Holmes/Watson until last year when I imprinted on Bucky Barnes like some kind of baby duck. Now I’m reading Sirius/Remus like my life depends on it.

Please tell the people about the genesis of your fic spreadsheet, which is the most epic fic spreadsheet ever. And then I would also like to know how you find fic to read!

At the beginning of 2018 I started to track my reading in general, so it made sense to log my fanfic reading alongside my profic reading. Also, when you read a couple hundred fics that involve the same characters, it helps to write a line distinguishing one from the other (“this is the one where Steve turns into a golden retriever”) that way if you ever want to reread it or recommend it, you can actually find it. Even better, I can just share the entire spreadsheet—or at least the fics that I’ve marked as favorites—with people who want it.

Also, spreadsheets in general provide the illusion of having accomplished something, which is satisfying.

I mainly find new fic via recommendations, or by reading other works by the writer of a fic I’ve enjoyed. Sometimes I’ll search by tag in AO3 and sort by kudos.

How has fic influenced your professional work? Were you already reading fic by the time you wrote The Ruin of a Rake? I ask because there’s such a terrific fic-ish line in that book.

The main thing I’ve taken away from fic is that story structure—hero’s journey, save the cat, Freytag’s pyramid, whatever—doesn’t matter much to me as a reader, and in fact might prioritize a certain kind of story that I’m not very interested in telling anyway. Compelling characters who act like humans, rising action, stakes that matter, satisfying resolution: that’s a story. Beats and pinch points and so forth can get you there, but they aren’t a goal in themselves. And for me, for what I like to read and what I like to write—which is mainly characters learning how to care for and about one another, and sometimes even care for and about themselves—it’s okay for the story to be quiet and tender rather than big and plotty. I’m not sure I’d have gotten there without some time in the fanfic trenches.

I believe I wrote Ruin during one of my Holmes/Watson periods and I’m dying to know what the fic-ish line is!¹

What makes you ship characters? Or more broadly, what elements in canon make you likely to want fic of the thing?

Best friends separated by time and injustice, subsequently reunited with mountains of hurt/comfort. I show up for that every time, and every time I’m genuinely shocked to discover that this dynamic hits me where I live. Bucky and Steve. Sirius and Remus. Holmes and Watson, after the hiatus. Even Crowley and Aziraphale, from a certain angle.

But the other thing that make me (and I think a large swath of fandom in general) crave fic is when canon is lacking. When canon provides a character with a really interesting backstory and complicated friendships and then completely ignores all of that in favor of, say, making a terrifying assassin decide she’s unlovable due to her infertility, this creates so much dissonance that I need fanfic to set it right. Or sometimes, when two characters have this really compelling dynamic and it’s the most interesting conflict in the entire canon, and then canon brushes it aside in favor of a really half-assed romance plot that manages to reduce women to prizes and sexy lamps while also forgetting how things like love and friendship actually work? Yeah, I’ll need some fic to smooth that over.

Have you ever read fic where you’re not familiar with the canon? What made you do it?

Many times! I follow favorite authors almost anywhere they go. I’ve never seen an episode of Supernatural, and God willing I never will, but I happily read in that fandom.

What do you love about fanfic as a medium? Are there things about the fic world that you’d like to see changed or improved?

One of my favorite things about fanfic is that it’s constantly inventing new tropes and forms. 5+1, soulmark AUs, Hogwarts AUs, etc. I love that “a character’s dick got too big so another character helps them feel okay about it” is a framework fic readers recognize in the way Renaissance audiences would have recognized the stock characters of the Commedia dell’arte. This makes me almost giddy with delight.

I also love that fanfic creates a community in which people can make things and tell stories and just do art together. It’s such a basic, human thing to do together. Since we don’t have bards reciting the Iliad to us, we have the MCU (God help us) and Stargate Atlantis and so forth to give us characters and scenarios that provide a sort of storytelling lingua franca.

Tell me some of your favorite tropes! And/or: Are there any tropes you really hate except for That One Fic that wore it best?

My favorites are hurt/comfort, angst/fluff, and literally anything genderbent. Because of basic patriarchal horseshit, canon provides a pitifully small number of women characters, and even fewer nonbinary or genderqueer characters. So when a writer decides to make, say, Draco Malfoy a girl? I will dive headfirst into that.

I tend not to actively seek out modern AUs, but I can think of a dozen I’ve really loved, all written by a handful of authors whose voices just work for me.

Are there fics or authors that influenced you, or that you frequently return to?

Katie Forsythe, candle_beck, and Speranza. They all influenced me as a baby writer, and continue to influence me now, and I never get tired of rereading their work.

Could you share some fic recs for fandom newbies?

YOU BET I CAN. Most of these don’t require much background in canon.

“From Tralfamadore, With Love” by newsbypostcard. Steve is sent 18 years into the future, and is reunited with a Bucky Barnes who has spent all those years without him. It’s heartbreaking and healing.

“Mistakes of Our Youth” by candle_beck. Holmes and Watson fall in love, then one of them moves on. Not exactly a happy ending, unless you really like sorrow? I promise my next recommendation will be light and airy!

“The Dogfather” by hollimichelle. Harry Potter is adopted by wonderful muggles, Sirius escapes from Azkaban ten years early and is Harry’s pet dog, and everybody behaves reasonably. Whenever an update to this series appears in my inbox I shriek.

“Sparklers on the Fourth of July” by what_alchemy. Bucky Barnes is a gender nonconforming woman. It contains the immortal line “kiss my stump, Rogers” and also pegging.

“20^th Century Limited” by Speranza. People who have been exposed to the serum have ESP with one another, so Steve and Bucky spend their years apart creating a world together in their minds. This is another crying-based recommendation.²

Cat Sebastian writes historical romance about LGBTQ+ people. She lives in a swampy part of the South but also on twitter.

The post Authors in Fandom: An Interview with Cat Sebastian appeared first on Reading the End.

How did you get into fanfic? Do you remember the first fandoms you read/wrote in?

We got a computer when I was 9 and the first thing I did was go online and look to see if there were any books by L. M. Montgomery that I could read for free on the Internet. I was not successful, either because the books hadn’t been added to Project Gutenberg yet or because I didn’t really know how to use a search engine. I ignored the Internet for the next few years, but as a kid I was perpetually starved for reading material so eventually I went back online and managed to find a couple of Star Trek fanfic sites. The rest was history!

The fandoms I started reading in were Star Trek (Next Generation and Voyager, lots of Mary Sues) and Disney’s Gargoyles. I had a Hanfic phase, Hanfic being RPF for the boyband Hanson, and a Sherlockian phase during which I got obsessed with Sherlock Holmes pastiches, especially Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell novels.

I read and lurked for several years before I posted my first fanfic. It was a Harry Potter vignette about Narcissa Malfoy. I wasn’t a big fan of the books or all that interested in the canon version of the Malfoys, but I had read a lot of HP fanfic! I only really started writing fanfic regularly from around age 16 and my first real fandom was Good Omens.

You’ve been a fanfic reader since you were eleven so you’ve seen some of fandom’s major changes! Have you seen changes in what fic looks like? What’s better about now, and what things about the fandom past do you miss?

I read fanfic irregularly these days, so I’m kind of out of date on modern fandom. There have been big new trends that were unthought of years ago – A/B/O is one, coffeeshop AUs another.

People talk a lot more about social justice issues now, which is mostly good. That said, I do think one of the nicest things about fanfic is how it’s all about desire – not just sexual desire, but the desire for narratives, fictional dynamics and character interactions you don’t get much of elsewhere. And I think people can get overfocused on being right or morally pure and miss what to me is a really fundamental part of fanfic, the centrality of that desire. It’s definitely a positive change that people are discussing racism, homophobia, ableism etc. more openly in fanfic fandom, though. I just don’t like that sort of thing being used as ammo in shipwars.

I suppose one of the biggest changes is how mainstream fanfic is now. I can’t count the number of writers and other industry pros I know in SFF, romance and YA who are open about writing and reading fanfic. There’s very little stigma attached to it anymore.

How has fanfic (reading or writing it, or just being in fandom!) influenced your professional work? You’ve spoken about being very aware of the way books of different eras and genres are in conversation with each other, as well as of the gaps that period fiction leaves unfilled. Do you think that awareness comes from a fanficcy ethos?

The consciousness of intertextuality is definitely a very fanfic thing, but I think my awareness of the gaps left unfilled comes more from the gap between what I read growing up in Malaysia – fiction in English, almost exclusively by Western writers – and the world I lived in IRL. That was a huge gap and it was present with the fanfic I read and wrote, too. This was actually the main reason I stopped reading and writing fanfic in my early twenties and moved to original fiction. I couldn’t find what I needed in either the published fiction I was reading or fanfic, so I had to make my own.

Fanfic was foundational to my development as a writer, though. The most important thing it taught me was to chase my joy – to uncover what makes a story live for me and cling to it. When you’re writing you’re always trying to get to the thing that’s so true, that you feel so strongly about, that you struggle to say it out loud. Because fanfic isn’t constrained by the demands of commerce or respectability, it’s a really good space for taking creative and emotional risks.

Are there particular fics or authors that influenced you or that you often go back to?

astolat is an unfailing comfort read for me, especially her Master & Commander fic. I find her inspiring in general, both in her approach to a professional writing career and how she participates in fandom. I’ve always loved Daegaer‘s Good Omens fic and I’m thrilled she’s written some more recent stories following the TV series. And I’ve never watched Highlander: The Series, but for some reason I read loads of HL fic as a teenager, and my favourite author in the fandom was Sylvia Volk, who wrote these amazing Dunnett-style historicals about Methos, with vivid settings, wonderful prose and wholly convincing OCs. I can’t work out why she isn’t a super famous fantasy author. Perhaps she is.

What do you love best about fanfic as a medium? And are there things about the fic world that you wish would change/improve?

I know the heart wants what it wants and I’m slightly contradicting some of the things I’ve said above – but I wish fanfic writers and readers would invest as much time and passion and excitement in female characters as they do in male characters.

Tell me some of your favorite tropes! And/or: Are there any tropes you really hate except for That One Fic that wore it best?

I like anything that imposes intimacy on characters – arranged marriage, oops we don’t know/like each other but now we have a soul bond, having to bring up a kid together. Also, pining – especially if two characters are pining after each other but don’t know it – and characters working together for a shared goal. I’m too old to understand soulmate marks and I hate how A/B/O has taken over fandom.

Could you share some fic recs for fandom newbies?

I always recommend The Good Student by Sylvia Volk. You probably don’t need to know anything about Highlander except the basic idea that they’re Immortals and go around cutting each other’s heads off. I suppose it’s gen, or maybe smarm. It’s supremely elegant and the ending is perfect.

Zen Cho is the author of a short story collection (Spirits Abroad, Fixi) and two historical fantasy novels (Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen, both published by Ace and Macmillan). She is a winner of the Crawford, British Fantasy and Hugo Awards, and a finalist for the Locus and Astounding Awards. She was born and raised in Malaysia, resides in the UK, and lives in a notional space between the two.

The post Authors in Fandom: An Interview with Zen Cho appeared first on Reading the End.

How did you get into reading fanfic? Do you remember the first fandoms you read/wrote in?

Sailor Moon! I was (oh god) about eight years old, bumbling around various fansites. I ended up finding one that I think was just called Sailor Jupiter, and it had fanfic about an original sailor scout (of course), Sailor Sun. The story was divided up by pages you clicked between, and it had midi files of appropriate music! playing in the background, and sprite edits, and I was in love and wanted to make my own. I ended up writing a maybe 1000 word/many chapters-long fic (I was eight, I didn’t understand pacing) about Makoto and Nephrite, who I shipped for some reason, complete with .jpgs I stole from various sites, printed it out, and proudly gave it to my mother, my father, my therapist…

How has fanfic (reading or writing it, or just being in fandom!) influenced your professional work? Are there elements of your book that were informed by your background in fic?

In my solo writing life, I actually moved away from fanfic after my Sailor Moon phase and focused on original short fiction, and then NaNoWriMo, but I was also spending a lot of my spare time on forum and IM roleplaying, and much of that was fanfic-y in nature. I learned a lot about writing to please an audience that way, and tried out a lot of voices, storylines, etc. I also finely honed my shipping skills.

But I didn’t write fanfic, because I was scared! I was afraid that a) nobody would care, and b) if people did read it, they’d hate it, because how could I write good fanfiction that captured what people loved about the base property? I read a lot of fanfiction, and had a lot of admiration for it, but I wasn’t brave enough to jump into the sandbox. It didn’t help that I’ve always ended up loving niche properties and extremely niche characters or ships.

It took until college when I played Dragon Age: Origins that I was bit hard enough by the fanfic bug that I didn’t care about the fear anymore. I spent about a year and a half writing many hundreds of thousands of words of fic. I jumped back into roleplaying, which I’d fallen out of due to classes. All of that work ended up paying off in the quality of my prose and my ability to actually analyze what I was trying to do, if I was doing it, and if not, where I wanted to improve.

I didn’t end up with a big readership, but I did end up with a passionate readership, and I learned that I didn’t want to change what I wrote in service of a bigger audience. And I think it paid off, because when I moved on to Dishonored fandom (where I learned everything I know about atmosphere!), a surprising number of readers followed me even though they hadn’t played the game in question, and many of those readers have gone on to buy The Luminous Dead!

Which, speaking of The Luminous Dead, you can thank shipping (and especially shippy RP) for why it’s a two-character book focused on a very twisty relationship. The Luminous Dead also had its entire second half completely changed in edits for publication, and I don’t think I could have managed that without all my experience in writing AU fic.

And relatedly, what made you step away from fic?

Time. I started The Luminous Dead to see if I could still write original fiction, and then that ballooned into a career that leaves me with very little time or brainspace to get as invested in media as I’d need to in order to write good fic.

What have you found to be different about writing fanfic vs pro fiction?

The need for worldbuilding and a slower introduction to characters. I had a leg up on those skills, I think, because I was used to writing minor characters that I needed to contextualize for readers who hadn’t even noticed them in the original source, and because I wrote AUs extensively, but I still haven’t developed a talent for sweeping worldbuilding of my own, and I’m still learning how to manage a large cast. In a lot of ways, The Luminous Dead was a great way to transition back to original work, because I had a limited cast and a world largely determined by the needs of the plot, so it kept me from getting too overwhelmed.

If you were/are a shippy person, what makes you ship a set of characters? (In my case, I tend to ship them if they are inextricably bonded yet intensely furious with each other, so you can imagine how The Luminous Dead has affected me.) Or if not, what elements in canon make you interested in fic of the thing?

“Inextricably bonded yet intensely furious with each other” sums it right up! Beyond that, I also tend to ship characters who have some kind of thematic link. I ship Callista Curnow and Daud in Dishonored, despite them never meeting in game, because they both are steeped in death and loss, but from very different angles. Similarly, I ship Ser Cauthrien and Nathaniel Howe from Dragon Age (again, despite them never meeting in game) because they both struggle with redefining themselves in the wake of learning that the people they trusted most in the world were actually monsters.

(And if you’ve read fic of either pairing, then yes, you’ve almost certainly read my work.)

Are there fics or authors that influenced you or that you often go back to?

Not so much go back to, but Mithrigil in the Tokyo Babylon fandom blew my mind with the quality of her work, as did Alanna, author of The Conscience of the King, a FF7 fic that is Rufus/Reeve that probably started me down the rarepair shipping path. They really raised the bar on what I thought people could do with fanfic. I also read both before I was writing fic of my own, which is probably why they stand out so much.

What do you love best about fanfic as a medium? And are there things about the fic world that you wish(ed) would change/improve?

Fic is great for allowing deep dives into character relationships, because so much of the world and character background is already known that you can really focus in on the meaty bits. It’s also a great place to write short things to test different techniques out. But for me, the best part was that it made practicing writing into extremely fun, social play. I didn’t even notice I was writing millions of words until they were already written, which I don’t think I could have ever done in just original work.

There are things I don’t miss about being in fandom/fic writing circles, but I think a lot of them arise directly out of fandom itself, of being engaged creatively with a property controlled by something external, and the fact that the majority of people drawn to any one thing will be drawn by similar reasons. That plus general human nature. So I don’t think they could (or maybe even should) change, if that makes sense.

Tell me some of your favorite tropes! And/or: Are there any tropes you really hate except for That One Fic that wore it best?

Favorite tropes! Definitely a fan of character-exploration-through-bdsm-ish-things, as well as bodyguard/boss situations, AUs that completely remix the original source material while still being recognizable, curtainfic, interstitial scenes, extremely intimate shaving scenes, hurt/comfort…

Could you share some fic recs for fandom newbies?

Nothing specific, since I have odd/particular tastes in fandoms and ships, but if you enjoyed Dishonored, I would definitely recommend looking up Lady Smaragdina and Pathopharmacology on AO3. And generally, just try out those weird rarepair fics you sometimes see. There’s a lot of really fascinating stuff that happens in that corner of fandom that often gets missed– a lot of great writers trying out weird things, touching different areas of the source material than usually get looked at.

Caitlin Starling is the author of The Luminous Dead, and served as narrative designer for the art installation A. Human. She’s always on the lookout for new ways to inflict insomnia. Find more of her work at www.caitlinstarling.com and follow her at @see_starling on Twitter.

The post Authors in Fandom: An Interview with Caitlin Starling appeared first on Reading the End.

How did you get into fanfic? Do you remember the first fandoms you read/wrote in?

Technically, the first fanfic that I wrote was a Star Trek parody co-written with a friend when I was in middle school. We’d never really heard of the term fanfic and we weren’t connected to any community of fans. Another friend attended a Star Trek convention that year, but my mom was busy and couldn’t take me.

Anyway, the parody was a (bad) play featuring a Mary Sue character who grew exasperated with the men of the Original Trek crew. There was a terrible running gag in which she would exclaim, “You…you…you men!” over and over, and Very Literal Poorly Written Spock interpreted this as a spaceship name “UUU Men.” As I said, it wasn’t any good, but it was fun to write.

It wouldn’t be until years later that I rediscovered fanfic in college, this time in the context of anime. I came across some Rurouni Kenshin fic on some Geocities shrine, and also a Lovecraft/Neon Genesis Evangelion crossover called “Children of an Elder God,” which I should finish reading since it apparently is still up on the web!

You’ve had the fairly unusual experience of writing fanfic for a thing and then /actually writing the thing,/ with Legend of the Five Rings. What was that transition like? Did your background in writing fic for it help or hinder?

It was a lot of fun but a lot of work! The “ascended fanfic writer” thing was not too unusual in L5R; longtime story writer Rich Wulf was originally an L5R ficwriter with his well-loved “Rokugan 2000” stories, which cast the samurai fantasy setting of L5R in a modern-day cyberpunkish variant, and my friend Nancy Sauer, who also joined the Story Team, started out in fanfic.

The main difference in the transition was, of course, the external constraints. Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG), which then owned the L5R property, preferred 2,000-word stories, so I had to confine myself to that length. But my long familiarity with the setting was generally helpful. In fact, before I tried out for the Story Team position, I reread over 1,000 (that is not a typo) L5R official stories from a period of some fifteen years to prepare. Most of those stories were quite short, but some were longer. It was a lot of research!

More broadly, how has fanfic (reading or writing it, or just being in fandom!) influenced your professional work? One thing I’ve noticed about fandom is its focus on bodies and embodiment — did that influence the way you thought and wrote about Jedao, who moves among bodies?

I’m afraid that particular concern predates my exposure to others’ fanfic and comes from the sf/f author Jack L. Chalker. I would not recommend Chalker generally to reader today, but his fiction showed a general preoccupation with bodies and gender and shape-changing/body-swapping. His Spirits of Flux & Anchor series, which I read to pieces as a kid, is in some ways a direct ancestor of my Machineries of Empire series.

On the other hand, the use of crackalicious tropes like amnesia and curtainfic interludes definitely comes from fanfic. I’ve written some short flash pieces in a “seven things” format inspired by fanfic’s “five things,” swapping out the number for worldbuilding numerological reasons. So it’s true that I owe a very large debt to fanfic for broadening my idea of what a narrative can look like.

Are there particular fics or authors that influenced you or that you often go back to?

Yahtzee’s “Phoenix Burning” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) for its worldbuilding and clever plotting; Rheanna’s “Vivere” (Angel) for its quiet beauty and psychological depth; Helen Keeble’s “1000 Nights of Darkness” (Legend of the Five Rings/Angel) for its flawless fusion of two disparate settings, humor, and grace notes of hope. Of course, I could list many more, but that’s a start.

What do you love best about fanfic as a medium? And are there things about the fic world that you wish would change/improve?

I love the sheer creativity and joy of the medium, and the fact that it has so many different faces depending on who you are and what you’re looking for. I guess I would change the anti/shipwar culture if I could. These are (generally) fictional characters and I’m a ship-and-let-ship (or not-ship, if you’re writing gen/worldbuilding/etc.) kind of person.

Tell me some of your favorite tropes! And/or: Are there any tropes you really hate except for That One Fic that wore it best?

Oh, gosh, where would I even start? Things I love: Amnesia, bodyswap, curtainfic and fluff, AUs (canon-divergence, coffee shop, high school, IN SPAAAAACE, vampires, anything), crossovers…that being said, I also love weird meta and deconstruction. Honestly, I’m easy.

I wouldn’t say I hate the trope, but I’m usually a hard sell on hurt/comfort because I don’t really get the dynamic. That being said, I have certainly read a lot of excellent hurt/comfort because this is a trope where one is spoilt for choice!

If you’re a shippy fic person, what are some canon things that make you ship people? Or if not, what elements in a canon make you eager to read or write fic of the thing?

Ha, I often go for dark, messed-up pairings between people who are absolutely terrible for each other, and who may also be terrible people. I was an Angel(us)/Buffy shipper precisely because that was in no way a healthy relationship! But I sometimes also enjoy happy ships–pretty much any two of the main characters in The Good Place, for instance.

Could you share some fic recs for fandom newbies?

I’ll have a go at a few that require minimal canon familiarity, in no particular order:

• Sholio’s “Cute But Prickly” (Iron Fist), in Ward gets turned into a potted cactus and Danny and Colleen have to figure out how to turn him back. It’s hilarious.
• For something darker, kangeiko’s “The Harvest of Orhoch” (The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin) stands alone, and is a tragic history/fable.
• For something funny/sexy/heartwarming, friskaz’s “Grande Soy Triple Dirty Chai” (Suits) is a barista AU where you don’t need to know the canon at all. It’s pure enjoyment.
• For any Hamilton fans, Fahye’s brilliant fic in verse “Rise Up” shouldn’t be missed. [blogger’s note: I ardently co-sign this, I adore this fic.]
• And for female friendship and culture clashes, Rheanna’s “Lunch and Other Obscenities” (Star Trek [2009]) is really great.

Thanks so much to the wondrous Yoon Ha Lee for doing this interview with me, and please do check out his Machineries of Empire series. You won’t regret it! He can be found on Twitter and his website!

The post Authors in Fandom: An Interview with Yoon Ha Lee appeared first on Reading the End.

How did you get into fandom?

Like so many before me, I was sucked into fandom via Star Trek. I used to watch TOS a bunch with my dad when I was 10 and even though I didn’t really know the concept of shipping yet, I shipped Spock/McCoy. One day I was looking for pictures of them and I found a link to a website where this woman had posted a fan fiction contest for Spock/McCoy and I was just sucked right in. I was so enamored with all of these cool and serious women writing these stories and fostering an environment of support and community with each other. I learned–very early on–about the history of fandom by reading about these people who had put together zines and painstakingly mailed them to each other, or gathered stories and presented them in mailing groups. I know a lot of people my age have only the vaguest understanding of how incredible modern fandom was at its birth, but I’ve been aware of it from the beginning and it has absolutely shadowed my perspective on the respectability of fan fiction and the incredible beauty and importance of fandom culture.

Oh my GOD tell me about your undergraduate thesis!

I actually had to upload it online to send to a professor which means that my undergrad these is available to be read! Please be kind though, I wrote this like….. 6 years ago and I promise my academic writing is better: It was called “Fan Fiction: Reevaluation and Practical Application.” I presented it at my university’s global symposium and it was extremely well received.

It was basically a quick evaluation of fandom culture’s value and impact on traditional media as a relationship of communication between art and the consumers of that art. It additionally focused on its reputation and how I felt that it was unjustly disparaged and incredibly underused as a media analysis tool. Also, because the presentation was for a crowd of serious academics, I discussed its potential use as a teaching tool–specifically creative writing and reading comprehension.

What are some of the fandoms you read in?

Whooo boy. I am a hardcore multi fandom, multishipper. Right now I’m reading a lot of The Man from UNCLE, Almost Human, Venom, and Game of Thrones. In the past I used to be really into Merlin, Elementary, Supernatural, Vikings, Les Miserables, Star Trek, Mad Max, Pacific Rim, Captain America, Thor, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Atlantis, The Magnificent Seven, Star Wars, and Teen Wolf. Growing up, I was very into anime fan fiction, but I’ve cooled down from that significantly.

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?

Reading fan fic has made me significantly better at eroticization of the mundane–which was a major facet of my first book The Wicker King. Taking romantic scenes and giving them the kind of sexual tension that other writers would have used sex to fill, but instead I use things like, brushing hair, or giving a tattoo, or just watching the other person. Fan fiction, particularly mature fan fiction, is pure wish fulfillment, pure shamelessness written in the dark for your friends. So, using it to learn what really makes people’s hearts race has served me very well.

I think that the most prolific fan fic author, and one of my absolute favorites is the incredibly famous Astolat. She has written in almost every fandom I’ve ever been in and she’s very skilled at what she does. She was one of the first fan fic writers I recognized at 15 and she’s still writing and now I’m in my late 20s. I definitely consider her a celebrity and would absolutely be weak-kneed if we met.

What tropes/AO3 tags are your catnip?

I’m not really attracted to specific tags, but I like seeing reversals of power structures. So, I like reading about whoever is the most dominant character getting in touch with their vulnerability. I tend to go on AO3 and do: Arrange by kudos> Completed Only> – Major Character Death, – Unrequited Love, -Whump, – Modern AU. I also really enjoy M/F/M poly pairings because there is less likelihood of the author writing really bad things about the F in order to cement the M/M ship. Other than that, I’m open for anything!

Do you have any recs for fanfic newbies?

My favorite fic of all time is a Captain America/Bucky fic called Into That Good Night and its an Interstellar AU. I’ve talked about it on twitter a couple of times, but I cannot overstate how incredible it is. I think that the best fan fics don’t require you to have that much information about the source material to really be impacted by them and this is absolutely one of them. This re-imagination of interstellar is so stunning that it genuinely enhanced my enjoyment of the movie itself.

The other fan fic I’m just endlessly impressed by is this Steve/Loki Groundhog Day AU called In The Realm of Ungrateful Cockroaches. Now, one of my ABSOLUTE favorite things is crack-pairings that are written by authors who are so good, so talented, that they force you to ship a weird pairing even though at the beginning of the story you couldn’t even vaguely imagine them together. This Is That Fic. I don’t give a hoot and a holler about Loki/Steve, but by the end of this, I was sobbing.

My final rec is another long one, but this time the fandom is Les Miserables. This is another really famous fan fic called Paris Burning. It features an incredible AU where every city on earth has a human form that lives forever. I can’t get into too much detail but Grantaire is secretly Paris and Enjolras is in love with him and this story will change your life.

What’s a fic you’ve read recently that you absolutely loved?

The Eagle fandom is constantly popping up for me when I’m craving historical fiction so I recently fell in love with this sweet story about werewolves called From The Depths of His Heart. I’m not super into werewolves as a mythological creature and I definitely don’t seek it out as an AU. However, I do know (from being an english major lmao) that British werewolves are historically different from other werewolves insomuch as they are considered to be bearers of good luck, tenderness and goodwill. The author of this did an amazing job of positioning the Roman occupation aspects of the story in contrast with the British historical culture and the whole thing was so incredibly tender.

Fandom and fanfiction are showing up more and more as plot points in professional fiction. Have you read any books that felt like a super accurate representation of fandom as you’ve experienced it?

I tend to try not to read books about fandom unless they are academic in nature or non-fiction. Not because I’m snobby, but just because most professional fiction about fandom tends to be contemporary. And even though I write contemporary, I tend towards reading fantasy, science fiction and middle grade adventure novels, if I’m not just reading fan fiction itself.

Share some AO3 tags for your new YA novel, The Weight of Our Stars!

While I Heavily Doubt Anyone Will Write Fic About It (but would die of joy if someone did), if TWotS was a fan fic the tag format would look like this:

The Weight of the Stars
Fandom: Interstellar
Rating: Teen
F/F
Angst & Fluff, Bullying, Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort, Poverty, Found Families, Original Characters, First Time, Big Muscle Girls!, Gay Panic, Tsundere

The post Authors in Fandom: An Interview with K. Ancrum appeared first on Reading the End.

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.