Fandom, fandom, fandom

[quinara]

I'm in such a weird place with fandom at the moment. I've been drifting offline more and more, but over the last couple of days I've been reading my old fics in one of those elusive moods where I can enjoy it rather than just picking out the flaws - and I miss them all. :( I don't know what's happened over the last couple of years - with my S6 Spuffy series and Fag Ends I've somehow ended up distracted away from all my short story experiments of 4-20K words, but I still love them to pieces. Two and a half year's distance means I can appreciate all of the frustration people felt reading An Exercise in Futility, for example, but then I kind of revel in that feeling. It entertains me that there are so many things spinning in the air - and that the actual emotional weight and impact of the story exist entirely in the negative space around it, one you've got to the end and think about it a bit. I have a plan for the novel it should go with somewhere on my other computer, and I kind of wish that that existed, but I doubt I'll ever get round to it.

I've even been re-reading my Spikeid - and I'm finally at peace with the pacing issues in books 6-8. I'm quite determined to revise them at some point, because it seems so clear to me that there are just a few transitions that need to be re-worked and bulked out with some space, but it's been finished for long enough that I can enjoy it.

And that's the thing, because, for whatever reason it seems/feels as though very little of what I write these days really strikes a chord with people, compared to back in the day. Which is fine. It's not as if I don't still do relatively well for feedback (love to you all!) and I'm not great at responding to positivity anyway, always looking for the next adrenaline rush and trying to find the negativity hidden between the lines - but then this seems to have got worse and actually become a problem in the last year or so, because I get so invested in things and then can't feel satisfied after I've put them up, obsessing for longer than makes me happy. Which makes me think it's not worth continuing; I should look to original stuff, give myself a change rather than hanging on for an audience who've gone another way. And yet, then I re-read old things again and remember I've only ever really written to entertain myself. And I still do.

Ergh, but then I can't bring myself to open the Word doc and start writing. I think I blame the Spikeid and Turn and Face the Strain. Those two projects burnt me out. And the fact I'm still dissatisfied with them (even if I'm at peace with that dissatisfaction) continues to burn me out. (Also, why can't I punctuate? Idiomatic prose/verse shouldn't be so difficult to punctuate in a way that brings across the nuances I want from it.)

Blech. This has been a self-obsessed ramble about me as an author. But then, I got into LJ back in the day to be part of a community of authors, so I fear this is what I'm posting.

Comments

[evilawyer]

Not that I wrote more than a handful of ficlets in the Buffy fandom, but I can tell you I'm right there with ya on the thing of getting a rush when you read your (or other people's, even) older stuff but at the same time not being particularly enthused about fandom due to community shrinkage.

World's longest sentence. I shall take a bow, now.

[quinara]

The thing is, I'm not sure that the community has really shrunk, so much as changed. I'm not doing myself any favours, because I actively avoid meta conversations these days, don't really rewatch the show... The main thing I'm still invested in is the writing - but that definitely seems to have slowed down in terms of people's interest.

*applauds*

[stultiloquentia]

I've got a nice little pile of "me too"s for you. Don't suppose you want 'em?

Burn-out, or, to put it more gently, letting the well refill, can take a hell of a long time. I've been offline more, too, this year. I love seeing you post, so you'd better stay in touch!!, but maybe it's a good thing. Origfic, too. Do any of your original ideas entertain you the same way fanfic does?

I have lots of minor grumbles about How Gone Are The Good Old Days, but the biggest thing I'm fretting about is I have a really good idea for an original story, but I'm scared to commit to it, because it's really big and complicated and ten kinds of difficult. I'm afraid I'm sort of using fandom as a security blanket: "Oh, well, I'll start working on that after I finish this fanfic; then my plate'll be clean." But you know me and finishing fanfic.

Rereading my old stuff has been good for me, too, though. Some of it's awful, but some of it's really freaking cool, and I have to hang onto that.

This has been another self-obsessed ramble. :P

[quinara]

I think you should go for the origfic! I'm slightly lucky with mine in that it came out of stuff I was researching (my main character is an itinerant sorceress/magic-seller/wise-woman/charlatan from late third-century Alexandria, who decides she wants to write a book; she has a bloke back in the city who works as a scribe/copyist/human printing press and it's about the relationship between them+literacy+Homer+there might be a bunch of Christian academics as well) - which is all stuff that my friends at the pub are very interested in hearing about. So, even if it goes nowhere, I think I can count on at least a couple of people who'll enjoy reading it, so it's not too different from fandom these days!

Having said that - what's your story about? This sounds something like the moment where (in the good old days especially) we would form ourselves a virtual writing group with us and a couple of other people who want to write a novel this year... (Caveat: people we like. ;) )