It's funny - lately (for the past few months, ackshully) I've been gobbling up Merlin fic like guilt-free junk food, and mightily enjoying the "download as epub" feature on the AO3* (not to mention the "order search results by wordcount" one). And, well, I've kind of read all the long stories on the AO3, now. So what now? I guess - sigh - I resort to delicious, and the annoyingness of length limits on LJ, and so now downloading things as epubs is somewhat more convoluted, blah blah...

Ah, huh. That warm fuzzy feeling of "it's so nice, just reading fanfic and not being involved in fandom and feeling all the self-inflicted emotional pressure of producing works and gaining approval/attention from it" receded when I started browsing stories on LJ, skimming past feedback, etc... I started feeling anxious and yearning and lonely and frustrated again. Clearly I have been conditioned by years of that kind of fannish exchange and process in that particular environment. (And the annoying thing is, I know that when I start writing again I well feel it NECESSARY to post on LJ rather than just on the AO3, because as shitty as this feeling is, I do need the treat that might come if I push the lever *this* time...)

Anyway. * For the record, my process of consuming fic on the AO3 is thus: 1) download epub, 2) read on ipad, 3) if I enjoyed it, I go to "my history" on a device with a keyboard, then bookmark and leave feedback. I probably leave feedback more consistently than I ever have! Which probably has not a little to do with the situation ramblingly described in the paragraph above.

Introducing the Fanfiction Header Builder!

The Fanfiction Header Builder is a tool made to help you create nicely-formatted headers for your stories with ease.

Just select the elements of the header you want to include, enter your own material, and then copy & paste the code into your "compose entry" text box (in plain text mode, of course).

Features include:

• Links to previous/next/master posts, if you're posting a chapter of a WIP - just enter the URL and it'll write the rest of the code for you


• Same goes if you'd rather link to your story elsewhere, rather than LJ cut it - just enter the URL and the text you want hyperlinked


• The option to include the "highlight to reveal" code on a couple of components, if you want to warn safely but hide spoilers


• A whole range of components you can take or leave as you see fit - and all the text fields are unrestricted, so you can put whatever material you like wherever you like.

And of course, you can always edit the header yourself once you've pasted it into your compose entry page.


You will need to have Javascript enabled in your browser in order for this tool to work.

It's optimised for Firefox, but has also been successfully tested in Safari and Chrome. It's incompatible with IE6 (I'd welcome feedback on how it works in IE7 & 8, though).


( further author notes )


Feel free to link to this post or the Header Builder itself if you'd like to share it around.

Thanks!

Honestly? I can't muster myself to be offended by your experience of winchestercon.

Those women's "ghost stories" quite probably have more readers than attended your show last night. Words crafted by those women have moved their thousands and thousands of readers to joy, love, grief, arousal, and helpless hilarity. Not to mention intellectual stimulation. And they're words that their readers will come back to again and again, probably still reading for years to come.

Can you say that of your own work? Seriously?

The fact that these women aren't doing it for money makes it all that more admirable. They're brilliant just because they can be, because they want to be. Not just that, but they have day jobs as well, upon which they wreak their intellect, competence and creativity on similarly worthy and world-changing pursuits. They're probably responsible for a whole lot of shit that not only makes your life easier, but supports and changes the society around you for the better.

All that, and writing their ghost stories, forming relationships, creating art, opening minds and forming a mind-bogglingly awesome community in their spare time. They live the double life of cultural superheroes.

Thousands of people around the world adore those women. And get a massive kick just out of the idea that even just a tiny percentage of them are congregated in a hotel in Denver, having an absolute ball.

So, I'm afraid you're going to have to try harder to harsh my squee. If anything, you've served to remind me to think about just how awesome fandom is, the art it creates, the love shared by the people in it. The sheer joy.

Also, are you kidding me? Fatties are totally hot. And you're totally right, blogging is yuck. I'll just be over at your totally classy MySpace page and absolutely riveting Twitter feed.

Firstly, disclaimer: this is not a mocking or wank-emulating post. Let me say from the outset (if you're not already familiar with my LJ) that when I say 'I love this stuff', I'm not being sarcastic - I really do love the out-there shit that fandom does. I absolutely adore it. I can't express how much glee and joy it gives me, unless that expression is a career plotted as a fan scholar in order to record and celebrate this kind of awesomeness.

And I'm not singling these kinds of 'unusual' plots as a quality judgement. I'm serious when I'm saying I'm not mocking them. I'm not suggesting that people *not* write these kinds of stories, dear god NO! they're a hugely important ingredient in the giant fandom mixing pot, I believe, and though they taste different to other kinds or styles or genres of stories, it doesn't mean they're not an important component of the recipe for a delicious meal. Fandom experience. thing. Yaknow? even if you prefer anchovies to capers, or bacon to tofu.

People get joy from writing these (why else do people write?). Other people get joy from reading them. Not everyone does, and not everyone's joy is the same. But those are not reasons for people - for anyone to stop writing. They're reasons to *keep* writing.

But anyway. I'm sure at least half of you can tell what thread of discussion (and outrage) I've been reading over the flist in the last couple of days :)

All that said, here are my top favourite cracked-out SPN fic scenarios. These are the ones I tell all my friends about to demonstrate how crazy-awesome fan brains are, and how permissable the Supernatural canon (and the fandom environment) really is. I'm typing this in my breaks at work, so possibly I'll look up the actual story URLs at some later date. Feel free to share your own favourites in the comments!

( cut for length and potential NSFW-ness )


I shall add more as I think of them omg. *crushes fandom to bosom*

ANYONE ON MY FLIST INVOLVED IN ANY FANDOM WHATSOEVER PLIS READ INSTEAD OF SCROLLING

So here's a thought: a fandom wikipedia. Multifandom, a one-stop-shop for terminology, pairing names, significant communities and events, anything you wanted, really. Because you would be the editors/creators. I'm enthused by this idea, and am willing to purchase a domain name and space specifically for it, as well as install the wiki software. Two questions:

1. Do you know if there's an existing fandom wiki or something like it out there?

2. Would you use it? (And by that I mean not only use it as a reference, but submit information to it.)



Second thing: IF YOU ARE OR EVER HAVE BEEN INVOLVED IN THE RPS RPG 'THE ESTABLISHMENT' ( CLICK HERE )

I was thinking earlier about my odd relationship with the Supernatural fandom - I'm totally into it, I love the picspams, the fics, the speculation, the meta, the fanonisation... but on a grass-roots level, I'm not part of the dialogue. I don't seem to have any SPN fans on my flist. Well, I mean, I do - but they're friends I already know. I have not gained any new friends on my flist since becoming part of the SPN fandom. So I'm not an active part of creating the dialogue on a personal (as in, discussion in which temporality plays some part; not out-of-time public texts like fic or art) level.

So why is this? Because usually this is how you (I) get involved in fandom, how dialogue spaces are opened up and/or muscled in on - you find people who are interesting, who are talking about things to do with that text/fandom that interest you, whose journals you keep going back to. Until eventually you get sick of going to their journal and just friend them already - thus integrating yourself (and them) into that fandom's particular network/system. It's a pattern that I've repeated through LOTR, lotrips, 21JS, Firefly... It's the key feature of Livejournal that really changed the space, face and substance of fandom - no longer were there 'off topic' posts; you were posting in your journal, everything was on-topic, be it fandom or otherwise. So I friend you because i like your lotrips fic, but I end up privy to your went-to-work-today or played-with-the-kids-today or had-sex-with-the-hubby today posts too; thus I get to know you, you get to know me, the public (fandom)/private ('RL/personality') boundaries are blurred.

But, fandom newsletters are subverting that dynamic interplay. I don't even have to friend the communities now, let alone worry about whether everyone who's writing/creating something is posting it to that community - the newsletter (be it four_lobsters, the_cortex or spnnewsletter) is gathering all those 'public space' texts (meta, recs, fics, art, picspam, news, speculation, etc etc) and posting them all in the one place... I don't have to worry about friending someone whose stories I like. I can just wait for the newsletter to tell me when and where they post the next one. Thus terminating the possibility of being forced to 'get to know them', and thus engage with them, and subsequently participate in that fertile interplay of instantaneous thought and discussion.

So, on the one hand I love fandom newsletters because boyhowdy, they sure are handy, but on the other... I've never felt so disconnected from a fandom before. I really gotta get out there and start friending. If only because I love to have my fingers in a whole bunch o' pies.