podfic, ascendio, avengers, my place in life, etc.

[jlh]

Before I go off on an entry filled with weird ego-feelings and the usual bittersweet memories, I'm excited to say that reena_jenkins has recorded a podfic of my Natasha/Pepper story, The Shoes Make the Woman, for the KISSES II podfic fest audiofemme is hosting for International Day of Femmeslash! You can also find it here on AO3! Go, go, listen! It's really super good! I am flabbergasted and can barely contain my excitement.

So! I went off to Ascendio last weekend, and it was a blast! Got to spend plenty of quality time with my pal catja_mikhailovic, whom I don't see enough, and roomed with heidi, whom I've been lucky enough to see a whole bunch this year, plus cherished convos with stinaleigh when she wasn't wrangling celebs, bookshop when she wasn't on a panel, and zorb when she wasn't Merlin's Circling it up. Heidi also gifted me with the general hilarity of sharing a suite with two thirteen-year-old boys who mostly wanted to hit each other over the head with a pillow shaped like a giant Duff beer can.

This next bit I'm putting behind the cut because it contains weird egotistical ramblings about fandom. As many of you have noticed (especially those of you who follow me on tumblr) I've been wading in the shallow end of Avengers fandom for some months now, and started writing in April. It's been a lot of fun—I've fallen in with a super nice crew of Clint/Coulson shippers on tumblr and twitter and LJ to some extent, and I've also been writing a bunch of Natasha/Pepper. I'm about to dive into the deep end with avengers_rbb and marvel_bang both on my plate for this summer. But you know, new fandom, new people, and I really am kind of shy; it's hard to break in on a conversation that feels like it's been going on for a while. Plus the fandom is enormous, churning out fics at a rate I know I can't keep up with as a reader, and has a number of BNFs who've brought their hundreds of readers over from other fantoms, so it's easy to feel lost. I'm pretty lousy at making a place for myself anyway, and I don't feel like I've found my feet yet.

On top of THAT, I've been feeling lately like I just hate everything I'm writing. It isn't matching what's in my head and it all feels dead and lifeless. I hate first drafts at the best of times, and being surrounded in Avengers by the kinds of people who write really well and really fast hasn't helped. Not to mention that I've been working on previous commitments that aren't Avengers and so aren't a part of the conversation, and the always-tricky idea of moving more and more into femslash all the time where it doesn't feel like there's much community to support me.

K/Mc is still home, of course, but it's a steady warm home, neither up nor down for me, and so serves as a nice backbone to all this change.

And then I show up at Ascendio and, I mean, my serious hard-core Harry Potter fic-writing days were a good seven years ago, even though I did post quite a lot in the past year what with the sequel and all. Yet—and this is an odd thing to say, bear with me—I kept getting the sense that people know who I am, which is super weird, isn't it? Cat and Aja kept giving me shootouts from panels that I wasn't on and I found myself waving from the audience; people were asking me about Seamus/Dean (and is there a resurgence of that? because yes, please) and gosh, even the Harry/Draco people knew me and I don't even write that pairing!

I feel that at heart, I'm a fairly solid mid-list fic writer. If I'm writing in your pairing, you may know me, but if I'm not, you almost certainly don't. I get rec'd here and there which, awesome, but it's not like people are all, "if you only read one fic IT MUST BE THIS ONE" or that killer app of recs, "it will break you in the right ways." My fics aren't going to break anyone. As for my "thoughts on yaoi", sure, I have SJ-ish and other meta thoughts, but they are rarely the sort that get a billion reflags on tumblr or get linked to a lot. I always have a sense of being just slightly out of the slipstream of fandom, not ever really being the thing that people want.

So to have on the one hand people being all over me at Ascendio, and on the other hand not quite hitting it in Avengers, was too drastic a shift for one weekend. I think I have the fandom bends. I'm not really sure where I stand or where other people think I stand or about the quality of my work or the things that I say about fandom or, jeez, any of it. I'm very off-balance at the moment.

Does any of this make sense? Any thoughts or advice would be very, very welcome.

In the meantime I think I might send out an email to some pals to ask for fix cheerleaders for all this stuff I have coming up. I've always been shy about actually talking about what I'm writing—it just seems weirdly egotistical to me, not to see others doing but to do myself; you know, "nobody cares about your rpg character" etc.—but I see lots of folks doing it and maybe it will make me feel better about my first drafts. Hmm. Anyway if anyone has actually read this far and has any interest in that, I would appreciate it!

Comments

[delicatale]

(if you don't know, this is ellievolia from Twitter)

I am so, so understanding everything here. I feel the exact same way, and it's like you put the things I've wanted to say for a while down for me. The whole mid-list fic writer, that will never write that ONE FIC everybody has to write...yeah. I get it.

However, for the talking to Avengers people and asking for cheerleading, you shouldn't be afraid to do so! At least not on Twitter, I'm sure people would be more than happy to help. Seems like a good collection of people there =D.

[jlh]

It's weird, right? Because you're in this place, and it's a damn good place, and people you don't know read your stuff, etc. But it's an ever shifting place and you can't count on anything. That said, this is my first AO3-heavy fandom so the idea of more than 4-5 kudos is still turning my head.

I should! I just feel weird like everyone is going to stare at me blankly. It's almost the same thing, like, you think you're in but you're never sure?

Thanks!!

[sistermagpie]

I am always cheerleading you in my heart! I don't usually volunteer just because I don't know Avengers fandom very well, but I could probably still read a story and get stuff out of it. It's not like I haven't read stories you've written in fandoms I didn't really know and enjoy them in the past!

Re: going into other fandoms...yeah, it's weird. Because you're not a RMS who moves from place to place taking your audience with you, so to an extent every fandom is a brand new place where you're a stranger, even if there are some people who know you from a different place. Besides which, on the net sometimes you don't even know who knows you. There may be lots of lurkers who know who you are that you would never have known about because you never have a good idea of how you come across to other people, you know? I mean, if somebody was discussing the fandom you don't know if you'd be one of the people they'd mention and if so, how they'd mention you.

Are there a lot of fandoms that have that one fic people should read? In H/D fandom there were definitely a few big heavy hitters but none of the other fandoms I've been in worked quite the same as HP, at least not on that level. Avengers seems like it could because it produces so much, but I don't know if it's got the same kind of breakdown of factions all producing the kinds of stories that compete for that.

I sometimes wonder if part of it wasn't that HP was a book series with a long waiting period between a limited amount of books. There are just so many big fics that seem to be about that particular time in the series and they change from book to book.

[jlh]

♥

I always look forward to your reading them and what you'll say in the comments, basically for ALL of them, and I'm always really lucky that you'll read so many things that I write in a billion random fandoms. Super, super lucky.

Apparently there ARE lurkers that know who I am! Argh, I dunno, in HP it was so easy, but looking back, I think I just had a way of thinking about myself in that fandom that possibly wasn't entirely accurate. Like, I thought of any kind of wider notoriety or whatever that I might have had as 100% attributable to "friend of Cassie" effect and having nothing to do with me at all. I think that was mostly because of the serious churn of people who would friend me because CC mentioned me, then unfriend me when they realized I wasn't very entertaining and I didn't talk about her. So I had this idea that people who follow me on social media aren't really following ME, which has clung to me even though CC isn't in my life anymore and she has nothing to do with the fandoms I'm in now.

Instead now, I simply don't know. When actually I probably didn't know then, either; I just thought I knew. And was casually dismissive.

In many pairings there are two or three fics that get rec'd over and over and are on the list of "if you want to get into the pairing read these." They are almost never my favorites or the ones I would rec, and not just because of the whole darkness thing. Like, the one in K/Mc is this fic called Switch and I actually don't even really like it at all. There's even already one fic that gets rec'd for C/C fandom when for that author I'd rec something entirely different, myself. Maybe it's just received wisdom reinforcing itself? But yeah, the "starter" rec lists are frequently very similar.

And you know how I feel about that stuff. I mean, there's an author I really love in Suits fandom, where I was mostly reading on the kink meme, and sie would write anon on the kink meme and every time it was something I really loved, it would get finished and bam, it was that same author, and they're some kind of super giant BNF. And that makes me reluctant to rec the fic because I KNOW they're on everyone's list, and I'd rather give some light to some other writer. (I do have a couple of other writers I like as well.) And I think that's how you get these GIANT BNFs, because most fangirls want the same sort of thing, you know?

HP was also god, so so so large, too big to coalesce around one thing. But even then, I mean, come on. It was the DT. There were plenty of people who didn't read it? But if someone was wandering into the fandom and was open to non-canon ships? Even if they were mostly a slasher? They would get rec'd the DT every time. Half the reason that thing was so huge was that people who weren't even in fandom and didn't even like fanfic were reading it.

That said, you know, the marauders people, the snape people, the OBHWF people, they were off doing their own things. I could give you the super short list of maybe three H/H fics everyone always rec'd. I guess it's a group think thing?

But yes, HP's timing was very different than, say, a TV show which has a glut of constant canon and then a relatively short hiatus. Even the Marvel movies come out more frequently--two a year most years.

[verity]

*loves*

I never know who knows who I am in the lands of fandom! The internet is so STRANGE sometimes. I hear your confusion.

*hugs*

[jlh]

It's weird because you want to calibrate your expectations so you will neither be disappointed, nor seem disingenuous. I generally just figure no one is paying attention to what I'm doing, which is what made Ascendio so weird.

[ikyoto.livejournal.com]

I really liked your describing this set of issues as "fandom bends." You and I may have different personalities, but I really see this as an opportunity to balance getting different things out of different parts of fandom. Being such a notable figure in the HP fandom attests to your ability to be noticed as a productive part of the conversation and author of fic over a period of time, and is a warm place to go back to if you need reassurance. The Avengers is your chance to help build the kind of femslash community that you would like to be a part of. Also Avengers fandom seems like because it is so enduring means you will have as much time as you need to find your place. This kind of growth is frequently painful (I could tell you in person about creative growing experiences/new communities where I frequently ended up in tears), but you are an amazing person with smart insights, so I look forward to hearing about your journey.

[melodiousb]

That your fics aren't ever the most popular doesn't mean that you're not the best at a certain kind of thing, because I think you are. Sure, sometimes I want to be a little bit broken. But sometimes I want to read something undramatically and realistically positive, and I don't know that anyone does that better than you.

[jlh]

You're right, of course. I think that way when I'm feeling good? And it's much less about woe, I'm not popular as this feeling that people WANT me to only be doing the popular thing? You know, the "why would you want to do anything other than what's at the white hot center of everything?" sort of thing. Sometimes I feel downright embarrassed that I keep doing other things.

Anyway super huge thanks for this comment! And sorry it took me a little bit to work out my thoughts well enough to reply!