Pod Aware 2012 Day 2: Podfic Fandom
I’m going to preface this by saying I don’t know how interesting this is going to be to listen to, because since everyone’s experience in fandom can be so individual, I couldn’t really think of a way to talk about this other than to discuss what my personal experience has been, discovering podfic and starting to interact with the community, etc. So, there’s going to be some self-centered rambling ahead, and I apologize for that in advance.
So, to start off… I discovered podfic about a year before I ever thought to try making any of my own. It was 2009, and I was about to go on an extended trip where I wouldn’t have any internet access for a while. I’ve learned from previous experiences that after a time without internet I get kind of cranky at the lack of fic, actually? It’s kind of like someone with a caffeine addiction going off of coffee, I actually start to get cravings for stories, and usually end up in an internet café somewhere reading. So, I was trying to be a bit more proactive this time and figure out if there was some way to take fic with me, and I didn’t have a smartphone to read it on so it had to be some other method. I can’t remember how I discovered audio fic, exactly, but I think I must have stumbled across Jinjurly’s Archive somehow, and gone, just, WOW. Wow. There was already quite a bit out there by 2009, especially in the larger fandoms like SGA and Bandom, and was like finding myself in a chocolate store.
So that was a wildly successful experience - I loaded up my iPod with a collection of whatever looked good and took it with me, and I had fic on-the-go, it was marvelous! But then when I got back from my trip, I pretty much went straight back to reading again and didn’t listen to podfic all that regularly after that. I’m actually kind of terrible at processing information auditorily, I get really fidgety and distracted usually - which is kind of ironic, since I’m a podficcer, but I’m much more of a visual person. If it weren’t for the fact that Audacity is primarily visual in terms of how you edit, I’d probably find it really difficult to make podfic at all. But yeah, if I’m not driving or on a plane or otherwise occupied, I find it kind of hard to just sit there and listen to a podfic all the way through, so for the rest of 2009 I downloaded a few things here and there, but that was about it. It seemed like podfic fandom was very LiveJournal-based back then? I’d follow certain podficcers’ journals to catch their updates, and it was also around then that I started following the Amplificathon community.
It was probably Amplificathon that gave me the idea to try making podfic of my own, finally. It was early 2010 when I made my first one and I’d been reading some fan-made tutorials and thought it would be fun and decided to give it a shot! So I went out and bought a 10-buck stick mic, and found a good starter fic by an author I loved in a fairly obscure fandom, so that if it was terrible at least there wouldn’t be too many people listening to it, and that was all she wrote! I loved it, it was a way of being creative I’d never tried before, and it was really nice to have something that came naturally to me, that felt easy, in a way writing or drawing never had. It was something that I felt like I could be good at.
And the wonderful thing was, once I started posting my first few podfics on Amplificathon, there was a really supportive atmosphere that made it easy to keep going once I started. The Podfic-Tips community, in particular, was invaluable for answering all the technical questions I had as I was figuring out the learning curve. And another thing that really helped in the beginning was that all the authors who I interacted with at first during that initial stage were really podfic-friendly and excited that I wanted to record their stories. So 2010 in general was a great year for me, I made about twelve podfics that year and I liked what I was making.
2011 was kind of a different story, unfortunately, for reasons that were all my own, not because of fandom. Basically what happened was I signed up for PodBang and bit off waaaay more than I could chew - I’d never done a podfic over 10,000 words before, and here I was signing up to do two separate epics, and - a combination of Real Life body-slamming me and some various other things meant I ended up defaulting on it, and though I didn’t realize at the time I kind of burned myself out completely. I kept trying to record for a while after that and it just wasn’t fun, so after a while I kind of thought podfic in general had been one of those one-year hobbies for me, that I was just done with it for good.
And then Avengers fandom happened. And suddenly I was having all these urges to do creative things again, it was awesome. It was interesting to come back to podfic fandom after a year away, because in that interim time there’d been a big shift away from LiveJournal, onto Tumblr and Twitter and AO3 even, so it was a very different dynamic in terms of the interactions I was having with people. It may have just been a side-effect of the fact that I wasn’t recording in mostly obscure fandoms anymore, but it felt like I was getting a lot more feedback, and that was really nice. Getting an account at AO3 in particular helped me a lot, because it felt like I had more of a centralized home base to post things to that was more accessible than my LiveJournal masterlist had ever been, for example.
And then about a month and a half ago I finally broke down and got a Twitter account, and discovered that there were like one million podficcers on Twitter! It was kind of nerve-wracking at first because here were all these people I’d encountered only through their podfics before, and a lot of them were people who I have a lot of respect for, and suddenly there was way more potential for interaction than it felt like there was in exchanging Livejournal comments or whatever. So that was kind of weird. But it’s also kind of awesome, because it really feels like there’s a support network there - you can tweet about how your current project’s going and get responses back, and ask questions, and grouse about podficcer woes, and it’s fun! It feels like that’s where a lot of the community is now, and it’s been really interesting to become more of a part of that. Up until this point in my life I’ve never interacted with fandom all that much, even though I’ve been a part of it for years, and it’s nice!
I’d really encourage anyone who’s more on the fringes of podfic fandom, or who’s just getting started recording or listening, to get more involved! Don’t be afraid to talk to people and ask questions, because podfic fandom people are some of the kindest, most welcoming people out there, and you won’t regret it.
So that’s basically all I wanted to talk about. Hope you enjoyed, and please have fun listening to the rest of the podcasts from today. Bye!
So, to start off… I discovered podfic about a year before I ever thought to try making any of my own. It was 2009, and I was about to go on an extended trip where I wouldn’t have any internet access for a while. I’ve learned from previous experiences that after a time without internet I get kind of cranky at the lack of fic, actually? It’s kind of like someone with a caffeine addiction going off of coffee, I actually start to get cravings for stories, and usually end up in an internet café somewhere reading. So, I was trying to be a bit more proactive this time and figure out if there was some way to take fic with me, and I didn’t have a smartphone to read it on so it had to be some other method. I can’t remember how I discovered audio fic, exactly, but I think I must have stumbled across Jinjurly’s Archive somehow, and gone, just, WOW. Wow. There was already quite a bit out there by 2009, especially in the larger fandoms like SGA and Bandom, and was like finding myself in a chocolate store.
So that was a wildly successful experience - I loaded up my iPod with a collection of whatever looked good and took it with me, and I had fic on-the-go, it was marvelous! But then when I got back from my trip, I pretty much went straight back to reading again and didn’t listen to podfic all that regularly after that. I’m actually kind of terrible at processing information auditorily, I get really fidgety and distracted usually - which is kind of ironic, since I’m a podficcer, but I’m much more of a visual person. If it weren’t for the fact that Audacity is primarily visual in terms of how you edit, I’d probably find it really difficult to make podfic at all. But yeah, if I’m not driving or on a plane or otherwise occupied, I find it kind of hard to just sit there and listen to a podfic all the way through, so for the rest of 2009 I downloaded a few things here and there, but that was about it. It seemed like podfic fandom was very LiveJournal-based back then? I’d follow certain podficcers’ journals to catch their updates, and it was also around then that I started following the Amplificathon community.
It was probably Amplificathon that gave me the idea to try making podfic of my own, finally. It was early 2010 when I made my first one and I’d been reading some fan-made tutorials and thought it would be fun and decided to give it a shot! So I went out and bought a 10-buck stick mic, and found a good starter fic by an author I loved in a fairly obscure fandom, so that if it was terrible at least there wouldn’t be too many people listening to it, and that was all she wrote! I loved it, it was a way of being creative I’d never tried before, and it was really nice to have something that came naturally to me, that felt easy, in a way writing or drawing never had. It was something that I felt like I could be good at.
And the wonderful thing was, once I started posting my first few podfics on Amplificathon, there was a really supportive atmosphere that made it easy to keep going once I started. The Podfic-Tips community, in particular, was invaluable for answering all the technical questions I had as I was figuring out the learning curve. And another thing that really helped in the beginning was that all the authors who I interacted with at first during that initial stage were really podfic-friendly and excited that I wanted to record their stories. So 2010 in general was a great year for me, I made about twelve podfics that year and I liked what I was making.
2011 was kind of a different story, unfortunately, for reasons that were all my own, not because of fandom. Basically what happened was I signed up for PodBang and bit off waaaay more than I could chew - I’d never done a podfic over 10,000 words before, and here I was signing up to do two separate epics, and - a combination of Real Life body-slamming me and some various other things meant I ended up defaulting on it, and though I didn’t realize at the time I kind of burned myself out completely. I kept trying to record for a while after that and it just wasn’t fun, so after a while I kind of thought podfic in general had been one of those one-year hobbies for me, that I was just done with it for good.
And then Avengers fandom happened. And suddenly I was having all these urges to do creative things again, it was awesome. It was interesting to come back to podfic fandom after a year away, because in that interim time there’d been a big shift away from LiveJournal, onto Tumblr and Twitter and AO3 even, so it was a very different dynamic in terms of the interactions I was having with people. It may have just been a side-effect of the fact that I wasn’t recording in mostly obscure fandoms anymore, but it felt like I was getting a lot more feedback, and that was really nice. Getting an account at AO3 in particular helped me a lot, because it felt like I had more of a centralized home base to post things to that was more accessible than my LiveJournal masterlist had ever been, for example.
And then about a month and a half ago I finally broke down and got a Twitter account, and discovered that there were like one million podficcers on Twitter! It was kind of nerve-wracking at first because here were all these people I’d encountered only through their podfics before, and a lot of them were people who I have a lot of respect for, and suddenly there was way more potential for interaction than it felt like there was in exchanging Livejournal comments or whatever. So that was kind of weird. But it’s also kind of awesome, because it really feels like there’s a support network there - you can tweet about how your current project’s going and get responses back, and ask questions, and grouse about podficcer woes, and it’s fun! It feels like that’s where a lot of the community is now, and it’s been really interesting to become more of a part of that. Up until this point in my life I’ve never interacted with fandom all that much, even though I’ve been a part of it for years, and it’s nice!
I’d really encourage anyone who’s more on the fringes of podfic fandom, or who’s just getting started recording or listening, to get more involved! Don’t be afraid to talk to people and ask questions, because podfic fandom people are some of the kindest, most welcoming people out there, and you won’t regret it.
So that’s basically all I wanted to talk about. Hope you enjoyed, and please have fun listening to the rest of the podcasts from today. Bye!