Last week, I finished writing a book about Nikola Tesla. That sounds impressive, right? Except for the part where I churned the manuscript out in eight days and sent it to some guy in New Jersey who’s going to slap a male pseudonym on the cover and rake in the profits from the Kindle sales. The Tesla book will be the sixth work of historical nonfiction I’ve sold in the last six months. I’m a working writer: hastily researched e-books pay my rent.
Searching the internet for my real name gets you my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. But a search for my fandom pseudonym leads to page after page of glowing reviews and excerpts from my fanfiction, including an article from the London Review of Books. Ph.D. candidates, journalists, and translators are interested in my fanfiction, but part of me still gets self-conscious about admitting that I write it.
Then there’s my original writing. This includes a blog, a few published essays, one unpublished novel that my agent spent a couple of years trying unsuccessfully to sell, and two partial manuscripts. At the age of 34, it’s hard not to feel that I should have more to show for myself.
Writing is difficult. That’s the truism that gets people through the hours of staring at a blinking cursor and a blank screen. Back in college, my fellow creative writing students and I moaned constantly about the difficulty of crafting taut, exquisite prose. But it wouldn’t be art if it was easy, we reassured ourselves.
Here’s my dirty writing secret: writing isn’t hard for me these days. I’m not talking about the time, effort, and revision that good writing requires, but about fluency, the simple ability to produce any words at all. Pervading the culture of my university writing department was the idea that good writing was sheer emotional torture, while worthless, commercial writing was more or less effortless. And I bought right into it. Like everyone in my creative writing classes, I used to beat my head against the barrier of writer’s block. I empathized when my friends complained about the sheer impossibility of finishing the novel they were “supposed to be working on”. Occasionally, though, I thought wistfully of high school, when I’d written most of two novels and never once struggled to get words down on paper.
*
Here’s an interesting thing I learned while researching the life of Nikola Tesla. When he was a kid, he struggled with what he called his “peculiar affliction”. He had visions, of the literal rather than the mystical variety. Things that he had seen superimposed themselves on his eyeballs. Blinking, even shutting his eyes, couldn’t make the pictures go away.
As an adult, Tesla concluded that human beings are essentially sophisticated automatons—meat robots, if you will. He believed that he had visions because everything he’d ever seen had been programmed into his memory as images, which were later retrieved by sensory triggers. From this, he hypothesized that every thought, action, and desire we have is programmed into us by the influences we’re exposed to. Free will, he decided, is merely an illusion created by the sophistication of our sensory processors.
Goofy as it sounds, I remember thinking, when I was about twelve, that my brain was also a lot like a computer. I’d read hundreds of books, from the Baby-Sitters Club to Wuthering Heights, and I felt like all those millions of words I’d consumed, all of that vocabulary, syntax, punctuation, description, and dialogue, were swimming around in my brain like numbers in a calculator, waiting to be retrieved and recombined in original ways.
Still, I lacked something more fundamental to writing: I had no idea what I wanted to say. Probably because expressing myself honestly was not a safe thing to do when I was growing up. But that changed when I started high school. For the first time in my life, I had eight hours a day when I could be myself. And I finally had friends; the desire to connect with them helped me find my voice. Once I started writing stories to entertain them, I had trouble doing anything else, including homework.
My best memories of high school are of being besieged in the hallways by people who were so invested in the fictional world I’d created that we got into fights over the romantic destinies I intended for my characters. “Raven’s going to end up with Edouard, right?” my friend Rachel asked me over IM one night. “Are you kidding? Edouard is an asshole,” I told her. I pretended to be affronted, but I was thrilled down to my toes by how much she cared.
My ability to sit down anywhere with a notebook and a pen and lose myself in writing for hours was something I took for granted as a teenager. I knew not everyone could do it, but I figured most people just didn’t want to. Then I got to college, where I learned that good writing was difficult, and by extension, writing that comes easily can only be crap. Only occasionally did it occur to me that there might be another reason I’d contracted verbal constipation—that I’d been plunged into a literary culture that didn’t value my voice.
*
Reinforcing the idea that valueless writing was effortless compared to serious writing was my secret success as a writer of fanfiction. My idea of a party in college was taking a bottle of wine and a bag of chocolates back to my dorm room and huddling over my laptop to read and write Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic. In fandom, I enjoyed a guilty pleasure unknown to the guys in my writing seminars: audience demand. From my readers, I received both generous praise and the helpful criticism I wasn’t getting from fellow students who saw me as competition.
In 2003, Maxine Kumin came to my university. I desperately wanted to win one of the spots in her masterclass. Not only was she a Pulitzer Prize winner, she had been friends with my literary idols, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. So I worked my ass off on a short poetry collection and submitted it. On the day of the workshop, I sat chewing the ends of my pink hair, getting more and more anxious as she gave feedback on other people’s work, explaining patiently that images are essential to the construction of poems.
The workshop was nearly over, and I had resigned myself to being overlooked, when Kumin produced my poem. “I wasn’t surprised when you said that you read the work of serious poets,” she told me. “Your poem is clearly the work of a mature writer.” She proceeded to analyze my poem like it was something she’d pulled out of a Norton Anthology; if she found any flaws in it, she didn’t mention them.
I walked out of that workshop in a daze, leaning weakly against the elevator wall, holding my poem against my chest. I did it, I thought. I wrote something that matters. But while I could show off my poetry to my fandom friends, I would rather have sporked myself in the eye than let on to Maxine Kumin that I wrote fic. I felt like I had to make a choice: keep writing for fandom—that is, for myself and my friends—or concentrate on writing for the literary fiction market.
Here’s what I see now when I look back at that period of my life: trying to write the kind of fiction my professors would approve of was giving me writer’s block. At 12, I felt the same paralysis: I was dying to write stories, but I was afraid of saying something that would get me into trouble. Consciousness of Authority looking over my shoulder produced voicelessness. Only the writing I did in secret allowed me to unleash the enormous store of words in my head onto the page.
*
After college, I committed seriously to writing novels. Friends of mine who had also written popular, novel-length fanfiction in the early 2000’s were starting to get their original novels published. They were publishing in the newly-burgeoning YA market, which still felt like a deviation from the career expected of me. But by then I was finally beginning to get suspicious of the white male influences that had shaped my career expectations. I started writing a YA urban fantasy novel with fairy tale themes; fairy tales, I reckoned, were inherently literary.
That novel took up the next five years of my life. A tower of manuscripts sits in a stack on my bedroom floor, a monument to the dozens of scraps and rewrites that transformed my simple fairy tale into what I saw as a more sophisticated novel of magical realism and domestic dysfunction. The final draft, all of my beta readers agreed, was powerful but uneven, a palimpsest of my ambiguities.
During the summer of 2007, with my novel foundering, I started my most ambitious project yet: a 90,000 word Harry Potter fic that was so personal and revealing that I didn’t plan to let any of my friends read it. Under a blazing North Carolina sun, I sat for eighteen hours a day in the grass of my parents’ backyard, screened from their eyes and questions by the thick growth of their vegetable plot. I chain-smoked, breathed in the spicy scent of growing tomatoes, guzzled cans of Coke Zero, and wrote longhand in a moleskine balanced on my knees. I didn’t feel hunger, thirst, my stiff back, or mosquito bites. By tapping into the horrible stew of emotions and experiences that I’d kept segregated from my literary writing, I produced 70,000 handwritten words in about three weeks.
It soon became obvious that I had stumbled on something powerful. I was getting ecstatic, heartfelt comments by the cartload. More importantly, I’d rediscovered the fluency I commanded in high school, when only the want of free time prevented me from writing thousands of words per day. It had to do with all those messy emotions, I decided. So about a month after I finished my first novel, I started writing another. This time, I gave myself permission to work with the same stew of ugly feelings that had fueled the Harry Potter fic. I finished that novel in four months; my beta readers agreed that it was like nothing I’d ever written before.
A month later, that second novel was in the hands of a literary agent. A month after that, I got the phone call: he wanted to take me on as a client. When the call ended, I found myself leaning against the wall outside my apartment, blinking stars out of my eyes. It was even better, I thought, than Maxine Kumin telling me I’d written a mature poem. This time, I knew that my book represented the fusion of my full skillset: the words I’d absorbed as a child, the careful attention to language I’d cultivated in college, and the voice that had finally struggled free from the constriction of other people’s expectations.
*
The great thing about writing shitty e-books for a living is that I can do it at all. After being unemployed for years while I struggled with health issues, I was desperate to find a way to support myself by working from home. I’ve amassed an impressive proofreading portfolio, but proofreading jobs aren’t always plentiful. The e-books provide me with a reliable monthly lump sum that covers my rent.
I couldn’t have produced 35,000 words of prose per month back when I was struggling to string sentences together. Only after writing literally millions of words of fiction could I have hoped to make a living this way.
God knows, I hope to one day support myself with writing that’s nearer to my heart. But for now, I’m grateful. My parents worked all their lives doing jobs they hated, that wore them out physically and emotionally. I’m spared that. And my fiction writing benefits from this work. I used to shy away from stories that required research, and now I’m confident in my ability to quickly and competently research pretty much anything.
I’m still working on my novels, and I’m still writing the occasional piece of fanfiction. I spend a lot of time thinking about something that I wrote in my LiveJournal back in 2010, when I was immersed in the last draft of my first book:
“This—what I’m feeling now, and have felt for the last couple of days—this, not publishing, not selling, is the holy grail of being a writer. This confidence that the work I’m doing is my proper work, and that I’m doing it well.”
The success I’ve achieved doesn’t look exactly like the success I imagined. But when does it ever? The market has changed since I was a teenager; the world has changed; I’ve changed. The words deep in my databanks keep coming, and I keep putting them down.
I really liked this. Also, I’m now on your blog, reading “Happy President’s Day, Here Is Some Knowledge About Washington and Lincoln” and I can tell I’m going to be over there for a while.
You, yourself, sound like you would be a great character to build a novel around.
that might be the best comment i’ve ever received.
Actually you have a lot in common with the main character in Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl…
Um, The Toast? Maybe you could start publishing some pieces that suck to make the separation a little easier on us? Because everything you’ve put up today has been gold.
It feels kind of like the end of a fireworks show, when they’re shooting off a ton of rockets all at once, and it’s super exciting but also bittersweet, because soon it’s just going to be the black sky and smoke and silence.
See THIS metaphor is much nicer than the sad one I had of The Toast as your high school boyfriend in the summer before you’ve agreed to break up to go away to university. That one felt sad. This is lovely.
This was a lovely piece, thankyou. Will be perusing your blog tomorrow!
Loved the final note about the confidence that this is your proper work. That is such a valuable feeling. Also, 70000 words in three weeks! !!
Thank you for writing this, it dovetails so well with my own writing experience except after struggling for years to write “good novels” I have pretty much refocused my attention on an entirely different career (which I also like and which pays much better!) and told myself I’ll write again someday in the far off future.
I was also writing enormous amounts of Buffy fic when I went to college to study literary writing and suddenly felt like I had to hide this huge portion of myself. Post-college I got (secretly) really into romance novels and wrote one and started a couple others… but never told any of my friends about it. It’s only now at 31 that I am starting to out myself to my friends (just a tiny bit!) as a fanfiction and romance novel reader and writer. I can’t even bring myself to tell my therapist. Meanwhile my literary novel is metaphorically growing dusty on my computer. I care about it! I love it! But it’s so much easier and more fun to go write some Clairedevil fic instead.
Another thing that really struck me in your piece is the importance of people reading and responding to your work. it’s lovely to think that we’re only writing for ourselves, but knowing someone out there has connected to something coming out of my brain or felt something because of my words, and getting that feedback almost instantaneously… that’s pretty incredible, and not to be undervalued. I think in “literary” circles this is often overlooked or pooh poohed… you’re not supposed to like your own work too much, and no one else is supposed to like it too much either.
TL; DR: congratulations on finding a way to support yourself as a writer and getting past at least some of the many, many emotional and logistical roadblocks we put up. Keep at it!
Plenty of grown-ass women in their 40s and 50s, even, still out there writing fic. Or reading it and wishing they still had time to write.
Oh my god.
I’ve been writing oodles lately. OODLES. Over 100 stories within the space of about a year and a half, ranging from <1000 words to two opuses upwards of 50k. And it’s all fanfiction, and it’s almost all about a rarepair that hardly anybody else writes about (plenty of shippers if you believe Tumblr and Twitter, but few other writers) and I keep thinking, “Is this somehow inappropriate?”
I’ve been feeling a little strange about it, as if this is not what I’m meant to spending my time on as a 35-year-old adult with a job and a mortgage and, like, grownup stuff. As if I’m producing too much. As if I’m annoying people with my dumb, fervent shipping like a twelve-year-old who just wants their OTP to kiiiiiiiisssssss already.
But I love the writing, especially the way it feels now, where a chance comment from a friend can spark 700 words within a couple of hours. Because it’s a rarepair, I don’t have huge quantities of replies and kudos, but the ones I have feel more valuable.
Thank you for this article. It’s like permission to keep doing something I love.
I am right there with you. Every time I see my word count on Ao3 I’m stuck between pride and cringing horror. As much as this essay spoke to me, I’m also glad to see I’m not alone in just slamming away at fic for the sheer joy of it, and not using it as a stepping stone to something “more”.
Congrats on writing so much! I’m 32 and in a similar boat – I’ve been working on a fanfic series that’s quickly approaching 100k and even though it’s been so much fun, I’ve been nervous/worried that it’s a waste of time and effort. It’s not *adult*, I berate myself. It’s not *productive*.
Reading this article and your comment help to assuage those feelings! Sometimes it’s nice to have a stamp of approval.
I never considered creative writing as something I would ever be good at (“I don’t know what to write about!” I always lamented) until a friend in my first fandom encouraged it.
Several fics (two of which are 50K+ words, one of which is 150K+) later, and I’m working on an original novel. I absolutely credit my fandoms with that, and I WILL say so in a totally nonironic way in my acknowledgments if/when I become a bestselling author 🙂
I don’t consider my fics “wasted” or “unproductive” time, though. It’s fun, and it’s practice. Like the author said, she had to write millions of words before she could get to the place she is. I do often feel like I “should” be writing my original novel, but fics come so much easier than creating my own characters from scratch. I do definitely feel like I’m writing “too much”, like, my 10K word chapters are too long, why would people want to read it? Or, it takes me too long to publish the next chapter, what if people give up and don’t care anymore? I know writing should (there’s that “should” again) be for yourself, but I cherish every like/kudos and comment/review that I get. And since I started writing fic and realized how much reviews are a lifeblood and encouragement, I make myself leave a positive, detailed review on every fic I even remotely enjoy. Calling out specific moments and squeeing about them is what I love about my reviews, so why not give that to someone else?
Anyway, that was a bit more than I expected to write (story of my life, ha!), but I appreciated this comment and also this article. Why, Toast, must you leave now? 🙁
So much of this could have been me, except in graduate school instead of college. In my grad school days and immediately after, I churned out hundreds of fics in various fandoms, while also trying to write “real stories” with much less success. By success, of course, I mean audience appeal. I took a writing class where the professor was impressed with my skill – skill I honed writing stories about spies on television shows
Eventually, a few years after graduate school, the drive to write dried up under the weight of life, and it’s only been recently that that’s started to change.
I’m not as prolific as you are, and haven’t managed (yet) to make any money on writing. But this resonates with a lot of thoughts I’ve been having. I’ve got several different completed novel drafts kicking around my external hard drive, and at least three other novels I started but never finished. They were all work. They were all hard and laborious and half written with an eye to what would make me seem like a serious and respectable person. I thought: I can’t just write what I’m comfortable with, I have a responsibility to branch out and expand my skills into newer, higher-brow, less tropey arenas. They were what I was supposed to write.
One of these novels, though, I dashed off on a lark in two months to entertain myself and a few friends. I didn’t take it seriously at all; I was just writing the kind of thing I wanted to read. And I took breaks from the ~serious~ writing I was supposed to do to throw down some weird-ass fanfiction, also based solely on what I liked, and what I thought about, and what I wanted to see in the world. And this stuff was easy. And that book I wasn’t serious about, and all the fanfic, are actually the best and most interesting stories I’ve ever written. That’s struck me as weird for a long time, but I’m starting to realize that… maybe this is the only way to write one’s best material. To just do what comes naturally.
Yeah, I’m also struggling with my original novel idea, and I think it’s because I want it to be so many wonderful (powerful, symbolic, literary) things that I’m putting too much pressure on myself. Maybe I just need to let go and write, and see what happens.
that might be the best comment i've ever received.
Wait–am I understanding this correctly? “Except for the part where I churned the manuscript out in eight days and sent it to some guy in New Jersey who’s going to slap a male pseudonym on the cover and rake in the profits from the Kindle sales.” The dude in NJ is going to rake in the profits?
You drew me in so much with this piece that I was already emotionally invested by the paragraph where Maxine Kumin liked your poetry. I love this piece.
I also read it that way, but later she says that she’s doing it for a living, so she must be making enough to support herself.
Yeah, the way it works is that he pays me a flat sum and then I sign over all the rights. The sum he pays me happens to be the exact amount of my rent. But he makes the money off of sales. I make the rest of my money by doing freelance proofreading gigs for other people.
And thank you!
Thank you! I loved reading this. It’s exciting to know from your piece and the comments that it’s not just me. When I was in high school and college, I loved writing stories for my friends, usually starring them in ridiculous adventures. I loved it, and it felt so easy and natural. After graduating, I spent a while trying to write a more serious novel, and then trying to write serious personal essays for the internet, and nothing quite worked. Last year, after a long break, I wrote a short fake tv script for some friends for fun, and I felt so much like myself while doing it. It was so refreshing, and kind of a surprise.
Anyways, it’s a long way of saying thank you for letting me know that other people have gone through this!
I identified with this so much. Thanks for sharing! As a teenager I wrote all these lovely, long fantasy epics that my friends loved. And I loved writing them! Then I went to college and felt like I had to write something “important”. Six years later, and I’m not writing fiction anymore. I trace that back to the whole “fantasy epics are not *important*” idea. Maybe I will sit down at my computer tonight and see if any other epics are still churning around in my head. . .
Also, my heart actually squeezed in my chest when Maxine Kumin liked your poetry. How wonderful, to get positive (and, it sounds like, thoughtful) criticism from someone you admire!
I identified with this so much. Thanks for sharing! As a teenager I wrote all these lovely, long fantasy epics that my friends loved. And I loved writing them! Then I went to college and felt like I had to write something "important". Six years later, and I'm not writing fiction anymore. I trace that back to the whole "fantasy epics are not *important*" idea. Maybe I will sit down at my computer tonight and see if any other epics are still churning around in my head. . .
Also, my heart actually squeezed in my chest when Maxine Kumin liked your poetry. How wonderful, to get positive (and, it sounds like, thoughtful) criticism from someone you admire!
Yeah, the way it works is that he pays me a flat sum and then I sign over all the rights. The sum he pays me happens to be the exact amount of my rent. But he makes the money off of sales. I make the rest of my money by doing freelance proofreading gigs for other people.
And thank you!
I loved this piece!
Also now I wonder if I read your long HP fic. I used to read a LOT of novel-length HP fics of all kinds.
I’m also curious…I read a lot for a few years and I’m wondering how hard it would be track down this particular fic.
I’ve loved your other pieces for the Toast, and this one is no different. Thanks for sharing this fabulous piece that’s resonating with so many of us.
Gosh. Reading this I had the wildest hunch about who you were in fandom, and I was actually right. I’ve lurked on your LJ many a time after finding your Harry Potter fanfiction. This isn’t the place for it, but can I just say: it is PRISTINE and important to me.
I was never a prolific writer (I celebrate heavily when I pass, say, 5k words), but I’ve had fanfic vs. pro writing on my mind lately and this piece was such a great addition to the brain stew. Best of luck in your publishing career. <3
Hah! Well, I figured there would be at least one person. I’m glad that it was important to you. <3
…I’d love to read this PRISTINE fic. How do I find, please? <3
DM or email me and I’ll give you my AO3 pseud. 🙂
I’m going to go ahead and solicit another clue. I’m kinda desperate to sate this curiosity.
This is such an encouraging post. I just graduated from college, and for my Senior Thesis I wrote a novel. And, uh, I failed. I mean, I wrote it, but I was just too embarrassed by it to turn it in. It was meant to be literary sci-fi with serious implications about marginalized people in society, but the only chapters that came easy were the ones from the POV of the “funny sidekick” character. And it was just so disjointed.
I too missed the “easy” writing of high school (I got addicted to deviantART moreso than A03, but it’s sort of the same thing re: audience feedback). I LOVED writing funny, sexy-strange stories that my friends at school would comment on, and I got into writing One Acts and monologues because the instant gratification of seeing an audience react to my work and laugh at my jokes was unbeatable.
But in college I ended up shying away from stand-up (what I secretly wanted to do) and only did a few open-mics that went…okay…because stand-up was the ultimate lowbrow, especially for a woman. On the one hand, you’ve got people saying, “You’re smarter than this / you’re better than this,” from my professorial crowd, and from the audience at open mics it’s all, “Well, you know, women just aren’t that funny…” and I can’t prove them wrong because, well? I’m just not that good yet.
But I suspect, I think I COULD be good at it because of the reaction my funny writing got in high school, and online. Maybe?
I dunno. College is over and I need work. So! So. We’ll see how it goes. At any rate, I love this post and I’m so glad writing really became your job. That’s fantastic. I really hope your novel gets published! I’d love to read it.
This is so great! That interaction with what you want (even need) to be writing, and what you think other people will approve of, is so difficult to navigate. Your description of finding your proper voice and your proper work resonated so much: I’m not there yet, but hopefully I will be.
I so admire your ability to do this. I have done some ghostwriting and admit that I just can’t do it. I’m really not good at writing to a script which others dictate… apparently clients are happy with my work, but I find it so, so hard — the kind of anguish you describe when trying to write for your professors is how I feel when I’m trying to write for someone else.
So in that sense, I’ve gone in an opposite direction, starting a PhD in Creative Writing, and writing my own work for publication, as slow and intermittent as that can be, and then editing and proofreading to make the money. I found it really interesting to read your perspective, and congratulate you on being able to do something I could never do myself! Good luck, and I hope it continues to be enjoyable and profitable for you!
You have a wonderful gift in the ability to keep putting words on the page, and it makes me happy to hear you’re writing in any form. I’ve never had an issue with writer’s block, but my writing also comes from a place of playfulness (and I share with enthusiastic friends). I’ve always written because writing is joyful for me; I don’t understand why anyone would want to write otherwise.
I’ve never written fanfiction though. I always thought that I lack the energy/obsessive dedication (love) that fanfiction writers possess, and so while I admire it and read occasionally I figured it wasn’t something I could do. Now you have me considering giving it a shot, though, especially because it sounds so similar to my own process of writing.
Yes! This is exactly why writing academically versus doing all the research is so different. It’s easy to get all the information you need, but hard to write it in a way that teachers, professors, etc will approve of. I can write thousands of words on my journal or talk about it with my friends for hours, but when it comes to actually writing my thesis, I get caught up in the language my advisor wants. Thank you for sharing your experiences, they’re very relateable.
If you don’t mind sharing, how does one get to write such books about Tesla & whatnot? Are there companies or people looking for writers? How would you suggest someone get started doing such a thing? Research is 100% my wheelhouse, especially things having to do with art or fashion and if I don’t have to worry about using formal academic language, I could probably do the same. Thanks!
I would suggest looking on the freelancer sites, although you need to be aware that the market is highly exploitative of this kind of labor. I don’t get paid nearly what my writing is worth, but I still get paid higher rates than most people. The people who hire for this expect unrealistic turnaround times–I had to fight for a month between books. And you generally don’t get to pick your topic. If you want to DM me, I’ll try to get you some more details.
Hah! Well, I figured there would be at least one person. I'm glad that it was important to you. <3
Ah, I do remember that feeling of being able to write and write and write when I was younger (9-16 maybe?). I would just get an idea and go. I think my experience of trying to write for academic or scientific style has really killed that ability but those were fun times. Thank you for helping me to remember.
I just about burst into tears when I read the paragraph in which you talk about writing the Harry Potter fanfic. (and obvs I’m dying to know your pseud and if I’ve read your work)
Your insights on why writing is effortless when you’re writing what you love without judgment really hit home for me. I’ve been struggling lately with my renewed reliance on fandom and fanfic, whether it’s “meaningful” enough, whether it’s an honorable passion or just a juvenile waste of time.
What I’ve come to realize is that the doubts over the things that feed my soul are undermining my ability to experience my emotional truth.
What fanfic allows people (mostly women) to do is process complex emotions, just as you wrote above. The fact that fanfic isn’t taken seriously is likely rooted in misogyny and patriarchy, and in this culture’s desperate fear of the uglier side of the limbic system.
DM or email me and I'll give you my AO3 pseud. 🙂
I would suggest looking on the freelancer sites, although you need to be aware that the market is highly exploitative of this kind of labor. I don't get paid nearly what my writing is worth, but I still get paid higher rates than most people. The people who hire for this expect unrealistic turnaround times–I had to fight for a month between books. And you generally don't get to pick your topic. If you want to DM me, I'll try to get you some more details.
Whew, so glad there are other ladies in their 30s who spend their days immersed in fanfic and fandom. And who struggle to spend their time on proper grown up things. I got into fandom as an easy release during grad school and keep expecting to get sick of it, but it is just not happening. I mean I remember my mom reading romance novels when I was a kid, so I guess in some ways it’s a different variation of the same deal. I think fic is actually superior in a lot of ways for how the writers and readers examine issues of identity, sexuality, trauma, and human connection with such thoughtfulness. I have so much respect for the epic fic writers who churn out such emotionally satisfying entertainment for free on a regular basis.
As somebody who is intensely interested in representation in children’s and YA lit, I’m amazed at how much more fully sexuality, in particular, is represented in fanfic. I mean, sure, the source text maybe has one character who’s gay and a few more who could be ambiguous but if you asked the author or producers they’d be like, “Oh, yeah, 100% straight, why do you ask?”
Whereas you venture onto AO3 or Tumblr and this character is toooootally bi, everyone agrees. Or there are oodles of slashfic or femmeslash, or characters who are ace or demi, plus also the whole romantic spectrum.
I’m not saying it’s a perfect system; particular characters do often get fetishized as the sexy exotic (oh, Poe, you adorable goober, how did you become the Sex God of the Star Wars universe), and slashfic in particular can really horribly sideline female characters. But it’s a completely grassroots way of creating representation where there is none, and of putting the possibility out there that no matter who or how or if you love, you’re still valid.
There’s this massive Skyrim fanfic that I’ve been working on, on and off for years now. There was a point where I decided to give it up and tried to write something more “profitable.” But I just kept coming back to my Skyrim fanfic because I loved the characters so much. Then I came up with the idea to transplant the characters themselves into a more serious world and that did not work, even remotely. So…it’s a Skyrim fanfic, as it will be forever and always, without an ounce of shame.
You’ve given me the validation I’ve been lacking for years. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I'm also curious…I read a lot for a few years and I'm wondering how hard it would be track down this particular fic.
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