No, this isn't a blog about meeting my husband in a cult and all our cultish adventures--THAT I don't have the energy for!
Years ago I wrote Spuffy fan fic (that's Spike and Buffy fan fic). After the end of the show I moved on to paranormal original stories for publication.
Over the years I've taken down two fan fics. One was an alternate universe fantasy with the Buffy characters, I plan to use that fantasy setting/plotline someday. The other was a fluffy Christmas fantasy I took down tonight. I felt terrible taking it down, but part of the paranormal plot and non canon characters fit so slick in a new plot idea, like my subconscious planned it.
Funny, those fan fics got thousands of hits/reads, far more than anything I've written for publication.
I've spent the past two weeks recording new ideas, something I haven't done in a while. Mostly these past months I've been editing several stories. Needed a break!
You know what? I don't hate my fan fics. Yes, I found errors--but the stories still evoked emotions, took me back to that short fan fic 'golden time' when the fan fic community was so vibrant for me.
The rest of my fan fics will stay in the archives. They were so closely tied to the show/canon and characters, the stories wouldn't make sense out of that context. I mean, you had to know how the character of Giles had changed to 'get' one of the stories--they were a form of commentary on the show...how I thought the show and characters should go.
.jpg)
I'm in the same boat - as a fanfic author I was widely respected in my fandoms, and I still have a ton of good friends from my time in the fanfic trenches. The last fanfic I wrote was less than a year ago, but I don't think I'm going to be writing them any more.
ReplyDeleteIt was always fun to borrow someone else's characters and play with them, like dolls, but the time for that has past, and now I've sort of moved onto making my own dolls (and then playing with them.)
I won't delete my fanfics. They're under an ancient internet handle, and nobody needs to know that this identity of CB is in any way, shape, or form related to the fanfic writer CW. And the writing in them wasn't bad, just undeveloped. I never made it past 30,000 words in a fanfic, because I ran out of new things to say.
If you can take those stories and reuse them, I say go for it! I've recycled a lot of my old stuff that I wrote years ago as well. The best part of it: it feels like I'm preserving those old stories by using parts of them for publishable books. I'm a bit of a sentimentalist when it comes to that. :0)
ReplyDeleteI know the heart I put into my fan fics--those characters were almost real to me, they were so deeply embedded as complex characters in my mind--keeping some of that alive in current and future works just seems to make the new stories have more meaning to me.
ReplyDeleteI used to write fan fiction too only mine was about the X-Men films. They're fun to do.
ReplyDeleteWriting for the Del Fantasma series is something like fanfic. You get a 'bible' and before I wrote Tiger Juice I bought and read most of the books. I am planning a third--one in 09, one in 10, one in 11.
ReplyDeleteX-mn was probably a fun fandom to write in.
ReplyDeleteNo other show has ever touched me as much as Buffy, though!
I do read Buffy and Firefly fanfic now and then.