30 Day Fanfiction Meme, Part 2
This is my second post for the 30 Day Fanfiction Meme. This post covers four of the thirty questions since I’m doing this in batches instead of across a steady 30 days.
2. Name the fandoms you’ve written in, and how much you’ve written in that fandom, and if you still write in it.
I started out writing for Star Trek: Voyager and about half of my existing stories are in that fandom. However, in terms of words written, I’ve probably written the most for either Earth 2 or Castle. I’ve also written a decent amount for Firefly and Star Trek: Enterprise.
I’ve written one story each for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, Early Edition, Terra Nova, The Cutting Edge, Casablanca and the rebooted version of Battlestar Galactica.
As far as I’m concerned, I never officially stop writing for a particular fandom, but during recent phases I’ve primarily written for Castle and Enterprise with a smattering of additions to the Firefly and Earth 2 work. This being said, I think I have at least one more Early Edition story and two more Voyager stories that I’ll get around to sooner or later. I’m less sure about other fandoms, or about any I might decide to try in the future.
As of this writing, my current fan fiction project is in the Castle fandom.
3. For each of these fandoms, what were your favorite characters to write?
I’m a rather ensemble-focused writer, but for some fandoms it’s not too difficult for me to make a choice. For example, for Voyager I find Janeway and Seven to be the easiest to write, although my actual favorites are Janeway and Paris. For Enterprise, it’s definitely Travis with T’Pol as a close second. This being said, even in these fandoms I like to write more than just my favorite characters.
In my other fandoms, though, I simply can’t pick a favorite. There are a few characters I tend to write a little less of (an example from Firefly is Simon) but that usually only means I find them a tad more challenging. It isn’t because I don’t like writing them or don’t think they’re interesting.
9. For each of these fandoms, what are your three favorite pairings to write?
Three pairings per fandom? Some of my fandoms don’t even have three pairings! Still, with a few exceptions, I’m pretty canon-friendly when it comes to my pairings.
I did a lot of my Janeway/Chakotay work before they became canonical in the Pocket Books series. I also enjoyed writing a bit of Paris/Torres though I had a tendency to put them in the background instead of focusing on them. And I’ll admit that I did have a lot of fun with my one Janeway/Paris story.
One other non-canonical pairing I’ve played around with is Castle and Lanie from Castle. I tended to set them in the second and third season and play it as pre-Caskett/Esplanie because that was how I imagined things, but even those got me yelled at within the fandom so I ultimately gave in and pulled those stories down. I strictly write canonical couples in that fandom.
My Earth 2 pairings are strictly canonical with the exception of Devon/Danzinger which many fans consider practically canon. The same goes for Firefly if you consider Mal/Inara to be practically canon as well (although I frequently write them as still dancing around each other).
It’s worth noting that I’m not strictly a pairing-based writer. Probably a good two-thirds of my fan fiction work either treats pairings as established fact and puts them in the background, or else doesn’t include pairings at all. I’ve been moving more and more in this direction as I’ve gotten older.
10. Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone and written a pairing you liked, but found you couldn’t write, or a pairing you didn’t like, and found you could?
For an Enterprise story I wrote in 2012 I intentionally went outside my comfort zone and wrote not just one, but two pairings that were outside my norm: Reed/Sato and Tucker/Reed. (The latter was way outside my zone as it is the only slash pairing I’ve ever done.) I’ll be honest: I don’t ship either couple, and it was hard to write the story because of that. But I think I was better and grew more as a writer for pushing outside the zone like that.
This being said, I don’t plan on trying it again anytime soon. I’m perfectly happy staying inside my comfort zone in fan fiction, and there’s still quite a lot of it left to explore.
Original Post: http://sonria.org/blog/2014/30-day-fanfiction-meme-part-2/. You can comment here or there.