My heart towards fandom may be two sizes too small...
I'm having the odd experience at the moment of coming to the party late.
This is in reference to the fandoms I'm writing in, which I always seem to encounter a good five years after the original excitement has died down. This is definitely the case with the fandom I've chosen for fanfic25 , The Matrix. I was a huge fan of these films when I was in high school, and still am. I filled exercise books with long, plotless and poorly-written excuses for fanfiction (and even posted one over at the Pit before I realised what I was about to unleash on the world). It was, in many ways, my first encounter with fandom. In the decade since the film was released, I've hauled my writing talents to a publishable level by all available methods. I focused on this fandom because it offered me a world that dropped bit characters into place, killed them off without so much as a second thought, and had tremendous scope to write about people that had inhabited not one, but two worlds, and had different experiences in each of them. It asked questions of what we thought about the world, and what would go through peoples' heads when they were in a place they knew was artificial at a fundamental level.
Now, I'm not suggesting that I consider my work to be unimpeachable; as a writer, I'm still learning things about the way events work. The problem I have, coming to the party late, is that a wide audience is no longer in existence. Ten years ago, a piece like A Lullaby for the Nebuchadnezzar might have had dozens of readers, even if I'm not particularly proud of how it turned out. Now, it gets however many people I can cajole to have a glance at it. And, especially when I am proud of a piece of work (like I am with Someone Else's Heat, see below) it's somewhat disheartening.
I know that I said coming into this that I'm aware a fandom doesn't exist any more, but that's not really the problem I have. A few people on my flist are relatively prolific, and I read their work with gusto, even when the work isn't in one of my usual fandoms. I do this because I like the way they write. It's the same to me when I am friends with someone in another country, talk to them regularly and get concerned when I hear about a storm in Edinburgh or a drought in the UAE. When I friend someone, I do it because I like the way they write: a consideration that extends to drabbles and epics and blog posts. I delete people from my facebook friends list based on whether they are interesting to read. To some extent, I think that there are a few people on my flist who have friended me back because I have said something funny or insightful or written something they really enjoyed.
Here's the thing: I think, in as unbiased a fashion as I can, that the stuff I have published here is some of my best work. Case in point:
This is from a sprawling epic that I wrote seven years ago.
'Then again, Trinity did cry. She knew that she cried as much as the rest of the crew. She knew that Neo would lean against the cabin wall and cry when he couldn't take any more pressure. She knew that Apoc, waking from yet another nightmare, would sit on the edge of his bed and cry. She knew that Mouse, even with Hope asleep in his arms, would stare at the ceiling and cry himself to sleep.'
This excerpt is, in my estimation, so poorly written that I had to forcibly stop myself from editing it as I typed it out. I wanted to find a sex scene, but all I could locate was 'almost-at-the-event-then-narrative-ellipsis' sequences (either a natural urge for censorship, although other pieces exist where I follow that urge with much less rigidity, or the prudishness of my 17-year-old self). At other points, I misspell the names of key characters and make word choices that I'm mortally ashamed of now.
From the sex scene at the end of Someone Else's Heat, which I consider some of my best fanwork to date:
'After a while the story is less interesting than the kisses, and Mouse shivers with anticipation as Zephyr kisses down his neck, hands running through his hair and dancing expertly around the socket on the back of his skull and then Mouse has his mouth on Zephyr's again, trying to swallow the fire that hurt Zephyr, to take it and make it his own, aching with more I want than he's ever had in his life.'
The point is, no matter what my thoughts may be on RPS or historical epics or The Matrix, there's a reason I read your writing: because it's bloody good. You craft a phrase that makes me doubt the sincerity of religious art. Your sketches make me want to commission work from you. In some way, no matter how arcane the fandom I write in, I like to imagine that the writing itself is good enough to have merits of its own. You don't have to know anything about the Nebuchadnezzar or the Construct to appreciate the stuff I write; in fact, I write without assuming a knowledge of the films. Unfortunately, I don't think anybody sees this.
I'm not aiming this complaint at you specifically, reader. In a way, I'm just bemoaning the collapse of what I think is a bloody good fandom, and the fact that I had the rotten luck to get to the Matrix party when there was nobody left to dance wildly to Rage Against the Machine.
Ah, screw it. Maybe I should just write Inception fic.