Life of the Party
Ever since I started working on finishing an old Angel fic that I never posted the ending to, I've been concerned about writing the different characters' voices again. I haven't written them in so long that I thought maybe I needed a refresher, and because the fic is set at some ambiguous point during season five of Angel, I decided to rewatch a
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Second I can’t believe that you’re here and talking about writing and apparently said writing has already also happened. (I also had to pause and do a small and embarrassing happy dance lol.)
Third I thought so many times about going back to finish some of my stories or writing something new but I also feel like I have no clue as to how to get started with the characters voices again. (And when I read some of what I previously wrote I’m never certain I had it down to begin with to be honest.) it has been 9 years since the last time I sat down and watched some episodes/seasons of Angel and even longer for Buffy. As you broke down the episode here I couldn’t believe how many details have slipped away. I used to be able to practically recite the dialogue along with the characters in a lot of episodes.
Fourth and last now I have to find the time to start reading all the newness! Christmas has officially come early for me. God bless us every one!
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Not kidding, ever since I got back into this fandom last year, I've visited your LJ a few times to re-read some of your old fic. Your sex scenes are SO good! Therefore you are not allowed to be hard on yourself about it. I have spoken.
You definitely need to rewatch Angel, though. Not necessarily for the purposes of fic writing as much as for your own personal health and well-being. I spent many years away as well, and let me tell you, coming back to the show made me SO happy! BUT I'd also love for you to come back with fic if you wanna. Can I recommend moving some of your old stuff over to AO3? It's a nice way to reintegrate into the fandom without putting pressure on yourself to write something new. I'm posting over there now and only linking from LJ for organizational purposes. But most of the people I knew from before have moved on from livejournal. I'm so glad you popped in! (That's what she said?)
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Actually I divorced the jerk I was separated from back in the day and got re-married to someone who doesn’t suck so I did do something over the years. Just not anything fannish or writerly (which probably isn’t a word but when you’re old you get to make things up and no one can challenge you and if they do you just pretend to be deaf or senile and go on about your business). Actually I remember mentioning the last time I commented on something you posted that Arianna got married but not that I did. She moved to Liverpool (England) with her husband.
But I’ve always stopped by your LJ to re-read things semi-frequently. I’ve found that some things I thought were good years ago don’t really hold up now that the fandom lost its shine (mostly triggered by the ship wars of the early 2010s lol). But I can ALWAYS depend on your stuff to be just as good as the last time I read it. I wrote porn with a whisper of plot to give the characters an excuse to do as I commanded. You wrote actual stories.
As for watching Angel again I’ve been considering it since the whole scandal about Joss Whedon probably being a jerk came out. Something I might pursue during the holidays as it’s been long enough that it’ll seem fresh again. I had never even heard of AO3 but maybe putting some of my stuff over there might be another project for the holidays. Although I can’t imagine anyone would be running to read it these days. I also would most likely immediately notice everything wrong with what I wrote and want to fix it and end up down a rabbit hole.
I miss writing but I thought this fandom was pretty much roadkill as everyone worth reading fell off the planet. (Or stopped communicating with me and started publishing things I wrote with them or mostly just wrote myself as their own “original” fic and making money from it. Which is a complaint for another day. ) So I had mostly been coming back around during the holidays when I was feeling sentimental/nostalgic and checking to see if anyone I knew was around. I guess last year I didn’t because the entire world was made of suck. Wouldn’t you know that would be when you’d show up and then I’d miss it!
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The Great Fandom Ship War is still going on and it still sucks so much rancid goat ass. That kinda crap is why I left fandom in the first place, and I didn't know where to go when I wanted to get back in, but then a friend invited me to Discord, so that's where I've been hanging out lately - that and AO3 for the fic. The thing is that by this point, the main ships in the war are spuffy and bangel, and even though I ship Angel around with lots of characters (including Spike), I had to choose bangel just so I won't have to see all the Angel-hate being posted by spuffies. It's pretty bad on social media, so I can't engage with BtVS content on twitter or tumblr or instagram, but Discord is okay.
I mostly came back to finish writing a couple of things left unfinished from back in the day. Even though the number of readers is a LOT smaller in this fandom now, I wanted to finish because I hate the idea of those incomplete fics just languishing here. So I feel like you can't really start back up for the feedback high that used to come from posting - something that would've gotten 50 comments back then might get 3 or 4 now - but it's worth it to me for the satisfaction of completing the work. But hey, if you start posting spangel on AO3 then together we might start a spangel renaissance! That would be something.
If you want to write in another fandom, though, AO3 would still be the way to go. It's a huge site, so you could get tons of feedback there if you wrote in one of the popular fandoms. I know some of the old BtVS/AtS fans write primarily in other fandoms for the feedback high but will still post a BtVS fic now and then for old times' sake.
Okay, you've GOT to tell me about what's going on with people making money off of something you wrote! That sounds infuriating.
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The whole idea of writing again is intriguing. I really have very little faith in my abilities to come up with anything readable at this point. And I’m not sure that there’s anyone who’s out there hoping I do or who would remember who I was. There were things I really wanted to finish. I had quite a bit of A Price Above Rubies as well as an entire Spikecentric take on a Christmas Carol that I’d written for some holiday fic challenge that I lost when my computer died on Christmas Eve. I moved a few weeks later, switched jobs, was traveling some and between all of that and the BS going on in the fandom I just kind of cashed out. Almost no one I really enjoyed reading was still around.
The whole thing (on LJ anyway) just wasn’t the fun it used to be. Even the feedback high wasn’t very satisfying anymore. I still had a somewhat decent number of readers even though the fandom was dwindling. But they weren’t the people I used to interact with who were actual fans of the shows. It used to be that even those who weren’t writing themselves left insightful and thought provoking comments. And I loved interacting with them. But I started to realize that some of the newer people writing and pulling a lot of attention had never even watched the shows. They were literally writing fanfic of fanfic. And the people reading my stuff and commenting ALSO had never watched the shows.
I actually had a couple of incidents that kind of broke the camel’s back for me. First I had someone comment on a fic I wrote asking about a scene that happened between Angel and Fred. They wanted to know which episode it was in so they could use the same scene in a story they were writing. I told them that it wasn’t an actual scene from the show and it was something I had written myself. They actually basically called me a liar and said that if I was so selfish and jealous of them and their writing that I wouldn’t tell them where to find the scene I could have just said so instead of pretending I wrote it.
Not long after that I had someone directly email me and copy me on a story that they “wrote”. It was Word for Word one of my Spike/Angels fics just with Xander’s name everywhere I had used Angel. They didn’t even change anything that I had Angel saying or doing. They just made Xander the one saying and doing those things instead. Which of course makes no sense because the way Xander speaks or behaves is nothing like how Angel does. And anyway just changing a person’s name throughout a story doesn’t make it yours. They wanted to let me know that they planned to post it and that they would mention that I gave them the “idea” for it. Of course I said I was NOT okay with that. They then basically said that I wasn’t a nice person and that I was lucky they bothered to even tell me.
Then I really just started to notice that fic I was seeing wasn’t based on the show but on situations these people had read in other peoples fics. I was just like - I’m out!
Now I really just want to read some things because I’m feeling nostalgic. I started to read the first chapter of Touch tonight but had to stop to do a million things. I realized I never read the first chapter back when you posted it years ago! Where was I? Had I been kidnapped by aliens? This must have been some sort of mind wipe situation lol!
Also glad to hear you’re happy with your new place! Nothing better than that really!
Another fun fact about Arianna is that she actually writes things that people request of her for money. I actually have no idea where she does it. Children don’t tell their parents everything lol. But I think what she writes is mostly based on various anime fandoms. So she’s carrying the Banner forward!
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