What is Fandom?

Fandom is focus. Fandom is obsession. Fandom is insatiable consumption. Fandom is sitting for hours in front of a TV screen a movie screen a computer screen with a comic book or a novel in your lap. Fandom is eyestrain and carpal tunnel syndrome and not enough exercise and staying up way, way past your bedtime.

Fandom is people you don’t tell your mother you’re meeting. Fandom is people in the closet, people out and proud, people in costumes, people in T-shirts with slogans only fifty others would understand. Fandom is a loud dinner conversation scaring the waiter and every table nearby.

Fandom is you in Germany and me in the US and him in Australia and her in Japan. Fandom is a sofabed in New York, a roadtrip to Oxnard, a friend behind a face in London. Fandom talks past timezones and accents and backgrounds. Fandom is conversation. Communication. Contact.

Fandom is drama. Fandom is melodrama. Fandom is high school. Fandom is Snacky’s law and Godwin’s law and Murphy’s law. Fandom is smarter than you. Fandom is stupider than you. Fandom is five arguments over and over and over again. Fandom is the first time you’ve ever had them.

Fandom is female. Fandom is male. Fandom lets female play at being male. Fandom bends gender, straight, gay, prude, promiscuous. Fandom is fantasy. Fandom doesn’t care about norms or taboos or boundaries. Fandom cares too much about norms and taboos and boundaries. Fandom is not real life. Fandom is closer than real life. Fandom knows what you’re really like in the bedroom. Fandom is how you would never, could never, be in the bedroom.

Fandom is shipping, never shipping, het, slash, gen, none of the above, more than the above. Fandom is love for characters you didn’t create. Fandom is recreating the characters you didn’t create. Fandom is appropriation, subversion, dissention. Fandom is adoration, extrapolation, imitation. Fandom is dissection, criticism, interpretation. Fandom is changing, experimenting, attempting.

Fandom is creating. Fandom is drawing, painting, vidding: nine seasons in four minutes of love. Fandom is words, language, authoring. Fandom is essays, stories, betas, parodies, filks, zines, usenet posts, blog posts, message board posts, emails, chats, petitions, wank, concrit, feedback, recs. Fandom is writing for the first time since you were twelve. Fandom is finally calling yourself a writer.

Fandom is signal and response. Fandom is a stranger moving you to tears, anger, laughter. Fandom is you moving a stranger to speak.

Fandom is distraction. Fandom is endangering your job, your grades, your relationships, your bank account. Fandom gets no work done. Fandom is too much work. Fandom was/is just a phase. Fandom could never be just a phase. Fandom is where you found a friend, a sister, a kindred spirit. Fandom is where you found a talent, a love, a reason.

Fandom is where you found yourself.

Writing is hard

"If I were psychic, you think I'd be writing? Writing is hard."

As part of my "I'm going to get back to writing on a regular basis" project, I've started to write a story. It isn't a novel or novella or even to short story length yet. I honestly have no idea how long it will end up being. But I'm working on it.

And I've realized that part of the reason I don't write stories is because writing is hard.

I've realized that I come up with great ideas while I'm working. I think of some interesting twists I want to incorporate into my story while I'm driving. I can create a character or story arc while I'm in dance. I have had some amazing dreams about scenes that would be amazing. But then, I sit down to write and there's nothing. There's something so easy about sitting down and writing a simple blog post. But taking an idea and creating a story out of it? That's hard.

I've also realized that I have a scene that I want to describe but when I go to actually write about a landscape, I get something more along the lines of "There's a tree" or "it is a person." I know that this is just part of the process, I need to focus on getting a rough draft out that at least outlines what I want before I can go back and really focus on details, but it is frustrating. Part of this is draw from the fact that I have all of these ideas that flit in and out of my head throughout the day and are gone by the time I sit down to write. I know that what I had thought about was a great scene, but I can't seem to remember what made it worthy of me actually putting it to paper.

I've also realize that one doesn't just simply sit down and write out a story and have every aspect of every character and every subplot worked out before hand. I know I'm still early in this whole writing process, but I understand what writers mean when they say that they have to let a character develop. Even in the early stages, preconceived notions that I have about characters aren't going to work out because these people are going to develop into "real" people.

And these problems are all part of the regular parts of writing. And this is why authors don't just pop out a book every couple of months. It takes time to not only create the story, but also to shape it and fine tune it into exactly what you want (and what the story wants).