Fanfic

or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb

For a while I was convinced that I'd stopped writing fanfiction. Not out of any particular shame imperative; I like fanfiction, and I'm an ardent defender of the idea that it's a core part of our cultural setting. I will argue any day that the Iliad and the Odyssey are fanfic, and if they aren't then the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy certainly are, both of them explicitly so. The stigma we associate with fanfic is entirely corporate in nature; when you publish a work through a publishing house you give them the right to copy your work - or, one might say, your copyright - and so fanfic has become derivative work, and thus lesser than in the eyes of a lot of people.

Fuck that, though. Write fanfic. Star Wars is fanfic (Flash Gordon, The Hidden Fortress). O Brother Where Art Thou is fanfic (The Odyssey). Star Trek (2009) is fanfic (Star Trek, which was itself famously "Wagon Train in space").

I stopped writing fanfiction because I stopped writing.

Except I haven't really. It's just that my fanfic has started taking the form of snippets, rather than anything long-form. It's clips of dialogue I send to my partner or my friends, it's premises I post on Discord, it's little drabbles (I hate, hate, hate that word) I put up on Mastodon. I haven't stopped doing it. It's just gotten... smaller and less centralized.

It's important, I think, to recognize the little things you're doing even when you can't do the big things. And I am writing, even if it's just this blog or snippets of dialogue or a half-thought-out note on a post-it.