When the new book comes out, will I wonder where all the wanking is?
I am a fanfic whore, all over again.
I thought I'd outgrown my ardent love for the genre during the last Hanson drought--I'd read every even remotely interesting piece of hanfic on the web, and it felt, to borrow a phrase, like liberation. The well was dry, and so was I. Scads of free time suddenly reverted to me--hours once spent reading or writing fanfic, or whining about one or the other of the aforementioned. Real, paper-printed books came back into my life. I did things like go for walks, and talk on the phone.
But now? I am in a fanfic phase. Again.
I can't even begin to guess when it will end, either: I'm years behind. Years that other, smarter people spent getting cozy in the Harry Potter fanon, years all filled up with sweet little stories and great smutty epics. I could start reading now and not stop for one single second until the next book came out, until the next movie was in theaters, and I would still barely scratch the surface of the big, shippy iceberg that is HPfic. Every story rec leads to twenty others, and my bookmarks list is a stewing mess of sites that I don't seem likely to ever read, having, as I do, only twenty-four hours per day to devote to the mission.
I don't know that I'll be writing much in this fandom, just because I seem to have lost the drive for it when I lost my weak-kneed, obsessive Hanson love. I've been writing fanfic since I was thirteen years old, after all, since the New Kids on the Block were at the top of the charts and the only computer in my house was a Commodore 128. Back in the day, I hungered for the writing even more than the reading, which would be nice to experience again. But I'm not holding my breath.
Getting your fanfic online took some effort, back in the day: You did the writing; you got the website at gurlpages or geocities; you learned some HTML, or maybe hooked yourself up with a WYSIWYG program. In 1997, sharing fanfic demanded an investment--of time, of resources, of brain cells.
Fast forward to 2005. There are now 8.5 trillion fanfic hosting sites online, most all of them fancy-pants and database driven. There's fanfiction.net. There's fictionalley.org. There's even LiveJournal, crowded tight with both fanfic writers and communities. Mostly, this is a good thing. Anyone can write, anyone can post, and no one needs to be judged on form over function, so to speak.
But I hate it, nonetheless.
Finding fiction is eight hundred times harder now than it ever used to be, as a lot of these newschool sites aren't indexed by search engines, and not many people bother to maintain a page of links to their favorite stories, that great friend of the fanfic reader. Nowadays, rec lists are the way to go, but they're hard to find--thanks to the non-indexing business--and hardly ever updated.
And, of course, the things that are easiest to find are often not the best. All those user-friendly database sites just exacerbate fanfic's fundamental problem: lots of people simply aren't meant to write. Or at least, I'm simply not meant to read a lot of people's writing, because after a word like "lover" appears three times in one paragraph of dialogue, I'm done. I'm laughing like a pot-smoking college kid watching Saturday Night Live in 1977.
In short, I am sick of pawing through the chaff in search of the wheat, but have neither the time nor the motivation to solve the problem for myself--or anyone else.
But in the meanwhile, here are a few recent favorites. In case anyone cares.
Restrictedsection.org. Holy smut, Batman! If you're over 18 (and don't live in Utah, as the site helpfully reminds every single time you click on one of its links), this is the place to go for all of your things-that-would-make-Larry-Flynt-blush needs. Dirrrrrty stories in every pairing imaginable, and some that I personally wish weren't. (McGonagall and Hermione? No thank you.)
shoebox_project. I hold this story personally responsible for my descent into Harry Potter madness. It's strictly PG Remus and Sirius love, so sweet and tender and yet totally boyishly believable that it, frankly, makes me want to toss my cookies with its sheer wonderfulness.
dawn_afterglow's marauder slash rec list. You'll need to block out the next few months on the old daily planner to get through all the fics linked here, but I honestly believe it to be worth the effort. I haven't read them all. But I wrote one ;)
Cartographer's Craft, by Same Vimes. Shockingly, considering my fanfic history, I'm not a big fan of stories that don't even pretend to fit into canon--AKA, "alternate universe" works. I don't care about total faithfulness to the books, but if you're going to write about Draco and Harry being best friends, I'm going to be skeeved out. So don't. Although a lot of this author's works fit into the AU category, I really, really like this one. It's just getting started, but the concept of Harry and Sirius getting to know each other at 15 is just too delicious to pass up. And it's even believable, using methods well-established in the real books. I fear it may have been abandoned unfinished by the author, but it's still worth reading.
remusxsirius. I can't stop gushing about this place, can I? The vast majority of the fiction that gets posted here is wonderful, and if you add it to your friends list, it's almost like getting home delivery of the Times or something. Easy access to all kinds of goodness, whenever you want it.
minnow_53. Staggeringly good and astonishingly productive. What more could you ask of a fanfic author? This girl is seriously a wonder--she writes comedy. She writes smut. She writes romance. She writes drama. And you should go read all of her stories, pronto. They will make you laugh, cry, and wish you had a boyfriend. Maybe all at once, even.
Whatever You Desire, by Penknife. Clean, slashy niceness from yet another across-the-board good writer. After reading a bunch of so-so fanfic, it's amazing to read something so effortlessly well done. This Penknife person is an example of all that's right with fanfic: some people really are meant to write.
I thought I'd outgrown my ardent love for the genre during the last Hanson drought--I'd read every even remotely interesting piece of hanfic on the web, and it felt, to borrow a phrase, like liberation. The well was dry, and so was I. Scads of free time suddenly reverted to me--hours once spent reading or writing fanfic, or whining about one or the other of the aforementioned. Real, paper-printed books came back into my life. I did things like go for walks, and talk on the phone.
But now? I am in a fanfic phase. Again.
I can't even begin to guess when it will end, either: I'm years behind. Years that other, smarter people spent getting cozy in the Harry Potter fanon, years all filled up with sweet little stories and great smutty epics. I could start reading now and not stop for one single second until the next book came out, until the next movie was in theaters, and I would still barely scratch the surface of the big, shippy iceberg that is HPfic. Every story rec leads to twenty others, and my bookmarks list is a stewing mess of sites that I don't seem likely to ever read, having, as I do, only twenty-four hours per day to devote to the mission.
I don't know that I'll be writing much in this fandom, just because I seem to have lost the drive for it when I lost my weak-kneed, obsessive Hanson love. I've been writing fanfic since I was thirteen years old, after all, since the New Kids on the Block were at the top of the charts and the only computer in my house was a Commodore 128. Back in the day, I hungered for the writing even more than the reading, which would be nice to experience again. But I'm not holding my breath.
Getting your fanfic online took some effort, back in the day: You did the writing; you got the website at gurlpages or geocities; you learned some HTML, or maybe hooked yourself up with a WYSIWYG program. In 1997, sharing fanfic demanded an investment--of time, of resources, of brain cells.
Fast forward to 2005. There are now 8.5 trillion fanfic hosting sites online, most all of them fancy-pants and database driven. There's fanfiction.net. There's fictionalley.org. There's even LiveJournal, crowded tight with both fanfic writers and communities. Mostly, this is a good thing. Anyone can write, anyone can post, and no one needs to be judged on form over function, so to speak.
But I hate it, nonetheless.
Finding fiction is eight hundred times harder now than it ever used to be, as a lot of these newschool sites aren't indexed by search engines, and not many people bother to maintain a page of links to their favorite stories, that great friend of the fanfic reader. Nowadays, rec lists are the way to go, but they're hard to find--thanks to the non-indexing business--and hardly ever updated.
And, of course, the things that are easiest to find are often not the best. All those user-friendly database sites just exacerbate fanfic's fundamental problem: lots of people simply aren't meant to write. Or at least, I'm simply not meant to read a lot of people's writing, because after a word like "lover" appears three times in one paragraph of dialogue, I'm done. I'm laughing like a pot-smoking college kid watching Saturday Night Live in 1977.
In short, I am sick of pawing through the chaff in search of the wheat, but have neither the time nor the motivation to solve the problem for myself--or anyone else.
But in the meanwhile, here are a few recent favorites. In case anyone cares.
Restrictedsection.org. Holy smut, Batman! If you're over 18 (and don't live in Utah, as the site helpfully reminds every single time you click on one of its links), this is the place to go for all of your things-that-would-make-Larry-Flynt-blush needs. Dirrrrrty stories in every pairing imaginable, and some that I personally wish weren't. (McGonagall and Hermione? No thank you.)
shoebox_project. I hold this story personally responsible for my descent into Harry Potter madness. It's strictly PG Remus and Sirius love, so sweet and tender and yet totally boyishly believable that it, frankly, makes me want to toss my cookies with its sheer wonderfulness.
dawn_afterglow's marauder slash rec list. You'll need to block out the next few months on the old daily planner to get through all the fics linked here, but I honestly believe it to be worth the effort. I haven't read them all. But I wrote one ;)
Cartographer's Craft, by Same Vimes. Shockingly, considering my fanfic history, I'm not a big fan of stories that don't even pretend to fit into canon--AKA, "alternate universe" works. I don't care about total faithfulness to the books, but if you're going to write about Draco and Harry being best friends, I'm going to be skeeved out. So don't. Although a lot of this author's works fit into the AU category, I really, really like this one. It's just getting started, but the concept of Harry and Sirius getting to know each other at 15 is just too delicious to pass up. And it's even believable, using methods well-established in the real books. I fear it may have been abandoned unfinished by the author, but it's still worth reading.
remusxsirius. I can't stop gushing about this place, can I? The vast majority of the fiction that gets posted here is wonderful, and if you add it to your friends list, it's almost like getting home delivery of the Times or something. Easy access to all kinds of goodness, whenever you want it.
minnow_53. Staggeringly good and astonishingly productive. What more could you ask of a fanfic author? This girl is seriously a wonder--she writes comedy. She writes smut. She writes romance. She writes drama. And you should go read all of her stories, pronto. They will make you laugh, cry, and wish you had a boyfriend. Maybe all at once, even.
Whatever You Desire, by Penknife. Clean, slashy niceness from yet another across-the-board good writer. After reading a bunch of so-so fanfic, it's amazing to read something so effortlessly well done. This Penknife person is an example of all that's right with fanfic: some people really are meant to write.