NONFIC: Fan Fiction Fan (a documentary memoir of slash fandom in 2002)
Title: Fan Fiction Fan.
Authors: Dusk Peterson, with contributions from mdbl, Steve Berman, J.M. Snyder, and Emily Veinglory.
Where to find Dusk: Website, Dreamwidth blog, InsaneJournal mirror blog, LiveJournal mirror blog, e-mail list.
Category: E-book about slash fandom in 2002, gathering posts, e-mails, story passages, and artwork from around that time. The e-book is for sale; the introduction is free online.
Fandoms mentioned in the e-book: Original slash, rare litslash (various), historical slash (meta), and The Phantom Menace.
Series: Pixel-Stained: a documentary memoir of the electronic publishing revolution in gay genre fiction.
Rating: PG-13. (However, one of the stories has onscreen sex.)
Warnings: Discussions about, and story passages with, powerfic and darkfic. Also, discussions of abuse and kink, and very brief discussions of chan. Basically, since I'm a powerfic/darkfic writer, I was discussing those subgenres a lot in 2002. However, there's plenty of other types of discussions in the e-book as well.
Length: 50,000 words.
Feedback: Yes, please.
Summary: (This is the official blurb, so please excuse the haughty third person.)
A decade before e-books and self-publishing shook up the publishing industry, an author faced a dilemma: When you've written stories in a genre that is rarely published, what do you do?
At the beginning of 2002, Dusk Peterson (a journalist, history writer, and aspiring professional novelist) stumbled across the fan fiction community, where tens of thousands of readers and writers enjoyed gay genre fiction, which publishers rarely published.
Peterson's Muse didn't want to write fan fiction. That didn't matter. Gleefully, Peterson began posting male/male stories with original fantasy settings and characters to "slash" fan fiction e-mail lists, at the same plunging into fanficcers' world of online fiction, "songvids," conventions, celebrations of movie premieres, and endless discussions of literature, history, sexuality, and ethics. In the process, Peterson became part of a community that was taking advantage of the Internet's power in order to distribute stories, art, and videos that couldn't be professionally published.
This first volume in the Pixel-Stained series includes reminiscences, stories, and art from yaoi author/artist mdbl; Steve Berman, founder of the gay and lesbian speculative fiction publishing company Lethe Press; J. M. Snyder, founder of the queer fiction press JMS Books; and m/m romance author Emily Veinglory.
The only thing I lost that's a pain to reconstruct is my last letter to you. I'd written a lengthy letter that was along the lines of "OH MY GOD, THE PHANTOM MENACE ZINE ARRIVED, IT'S SO ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS, I'M ABOUT TO HAVE A HEART ATTACK, YOU'RE AN UTTER SWEETHEART TO SEND ME THIS, KISS KISS KISS-" and as you can imagine, it's a bit hard to reconstruct that type of letter.