So, fannishness

[jlh]

So, two things, neither with spoilers.

First, after feeling rather discouraged over it for some time, I've decided in the wake of DH to write a long-planned sequel to Eight Ways from Sunday. I probably won't start it for a little while as there's school stuffs to be written first, but with the end of canon writing a story that is AU—or more accurately, GoF canon—feels like less of a "bad thing." One reason is that canon is set, so my stories can no longer be interpreted as my canon predictions. The other is that the bitching about "non canonical" fanfic—you can read a rant about it here, but be careful as there are spoilers—as well as the time I've spent in other fandoms has thrown me strongly in the other direction. I can't write canon and it isn't even my job. I'm not particularly interested in writing fic off DH. I am interested in writing down the story arcs and futures that I had seen some years ago; in finishing my fanfic100 Seamus/Dean commitment; and then in "closing the book" as it were. I'm hopeful that some of you will want to come along for that journey, but another thing that being in other fandoms has given me is a better sense of scale. I'm going to be a little cryptic here, but things in HP are not as they were, and I'm not in the same place I used to be, and I've found that having your own happy little place can be so much more fulfilling than getting into the vast rough-and-tumble. So thank you, fellow flaming_potato Rymon shippers, for teaching me that.

Speaking of which, I've also realized that yes, there are ways in which I am a geek and a fangirl, but being fannish about SF/F isn't one of them. Plots about saving the world don't really move me and I'm trying to be done feeling guilty about that. Also, I care about endings—care about them deeply—and television burned me good last year between Veronica Mars and Studio 60 and even CSI. I find myself not wanting to get back on the hour-long drama horse because I just don't trust television writers not to dick around for the sake of dicking around. There are plenty of shows that I didn't catch the first time around, and those of you who have made your way through Buffy DVDs have inspired me to walk away, to a certain extent, from contemporaneous television watching. I'm not saying I won't pick up any shows at all—people are saying good things about Pushing Up Daisies and I am intrigued by New Amsterdam—but it isn't something I'm looking for. Not that I'm getting rid of the cable TV—I'm too much of a culture whore for that! I'll be watching Ugly Betty and How I Met Your Mother and of course American Idol in the spring. And I'm loving Simon Schama's series The Power of Art right now. Plus I've been seeing a lot more movies than I used to, so expect talk about that.

And the LJ? Well, there will still be fic, and erotic fic, because I've been writing erotica for almost 25 years and I'm not sure why I should stop now. And there will be more race posts, because I find myself more interested in that these days. And of course I will still be talking about all the things I usually talk about, including the shows I AM watching. Whether I'm shunting myself into irrelevance I'm not sure, but I find that I'm not sure how much I care. (Although I might change my tune after the mass defriending!)

Comments

[aegeus.livejournal.com]

That is so weird, I just re-read 8WFS right before DH.

Well. I still have the last chapter to read, actually. The leak dropped before I was done. *goes*

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Awww! I'm so flattered. I'm always sort of amazed that there are people still reading it, but then, there's stuff that I'll still go back and read, too, so there you go.

[misscake]

Mass defriending? What? Where?

*settles in with popcorn to wait for 8WFS sequel*

[anemonerose.livejournal.com]

I personally don't see anything wrong with writing in your own AU world. I used to consider myself to be primarily an H/D shipper (and now am more of a Remus/Sirius shipper, so really I'm pretty screwed either way :-P) and that ship was certainly never going to be canon and that never bothered me. I still have a WIP that I'm working on (it's post GoF, too and definitely not OotP-compliant) and will continue to work on even if it is, like I said, completely AU. I think there is room in a fandom this large for everyone to read and write what they want, regardless of whether it's official canon or not. But yay, I'm glad DH has at least inspired you into writing your sequel! :)

[conob.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to figure out how to get myself back into a tv-watching schedule. Sounds funny, yes? but after years of grad school, during most of which my ex-roommate camped out in the front room, I've gone completely cold. (It was her tv but not precisely her room. ahem.) I've enjoyed the few episodes of How I Met Your Mother that I've managed to catch....

Relevance is relative, isn't it? :)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

You know, as HP canon goes on I really almost feel like there is already this AU it's totally valid to write in. As you say, nobody ever managed to ape her style at all, but I think it's more than that. It's more the way that fanfic has always dealt with the school and the characters differently than in canon, where it's just more inclusive--and often just as believable or actually more so. So I can believe Potter fanfic might happily continue in that same AU--it'd be interesting if the post-GoF version wound up really dominating things too. I don't mean pre-House of Black or pre-Luna, but just more that feel.