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writethisfanficHi, I'm Drae, your not-antisocial-just-shy neighbourhood mod, and this is my intro post.
I got into fandom about ten years ago, when I was fifteen and still somewhat new to the ways of the internet. Back then in the olden days of the Web 1.0, getting something posted to an archive mostly required sending an email to the administrator, who did all the hard work.
Like many fanfiction writers of my generation, I wrote for Gundam Wing without ever having encountered the canon, basing all characterization on other fanfiction (most of which probably did the same). Like many fic writers in general, my first works involved blatant Mary Sues, although I didn't know what that was at the time.
I'd like to say I've made every single mistake in the book, but that would imply that I'm done making them.
Over the years, I've moved from a French Final Fantasy VIII archive to fanfiction.net (switching to English at this point) to Livejournal to Insanejournal to Dreamwidth to the Archive of Our Own, which will hopefully be my final stop.
Apart from my first dip in fandom, which was in Animorphs, and a brief stay in Harry Potter around the time Goblet of Fire came out, I'm mostly focused on manga and anime, and occasionally video games. I'm also a serial monofandomist (one word, made up), meaning that once I find a new shiny series to get interested in I tend to drop the previous ones. Right now, my fandom of choice is Ookiku Furikabutte, which is an animanga about boys with issues playing baseball. And holding hands.
Which leads me to content! Most of my stories feature males getting it on together, either in an obvious fashion or as background. As a reader, though, I'll take pretty much everything: het, slash, femslash, gen, anything is a go, and for any fandom I've seen the original of. The only things I tend to avoid are AUs, but even for that there are exceptions.
In writing, I tend to pay a lot of attention to characterization, which leads me to inhaling canon again and again until I feel I have a handle on the characters I'm writing. I avoid epithets like the plague to the point of overusing character names, and tend to write in third person limited point of view.
I'm fairly open to constructive criticism, although I generally don't go out of my way to ask for it except from my beta-reader.
Online tools I use:
Zoho Writer (where all my writings are stored for easy access from the four computers I use)
Dictionary.com (for the dictionary and thesaurus functions)
Gender Genie (for a quick, cheap check of whether the voice is male or female, as I usually write in third person limited)
Fanfiction Header Builder (for easy and coherent headers)
Wordle (because it makes pretty word clouds and I'm always looking for more ways to procrastinate)
I got into fandom about ten years ago, when I was fifteen and still somewhat new to the ways of the internet. Back then in the olden days of the Web 1.0, getting something posted to an archive mostly required sending an email to the administrator, who did all the hard work.
Like many fanfiction writers of my generation, I wrote for Gundam Wing without ever having encountered the canon, basing all characterization on other fanfiction (most of which probably did the same). Like many fic writers in general, my first works involved blatant Mary Sues, although I didn't know what that was at the time.
I'd like to say I've made every single mistake in the book, but that would imply that I'm done making them.
Over the years, I've moved from a French Final Fantasy VIII archive to fanfiction.net (switching to English at this point) to Livejournal to Insanejournal to Dreamwidth to the Archive of Our Own, which will hopefully be my final stop.
Apart from my first dip in fandom, which was in Animorphs, and a brief stay in Harry Potter around the time Goblet of Fire came out, I'm mostly focused on manga and anime, and occasionally video games. I'm also a serial monofandomist (one word, made up), meaning that once I find a new shiny series to get interested in I tend to drop the previous ones. Right now, my fandom of choice is Ookiku Furikabutte, which is an animanga about boys with issues playing baseball. And holding hands.
Which leads me to content! Most of my stories feature males getting it on together, either in an obvious fashion or as background. As a reader, though, I'll take pretty much everything: het, slash, femslash, gen, anything is a go, and for any fandom I've seen the original of. The only things I tend to avoid are AUs, but even for that there are exceptions.
In writing, I tend to pay a lot of attention to characterization, which leads me to inhaling canon again and again until I feel I have a handle on the characters I'm writing. I avoid epithets like the plague to the point of overusing character names, and tend to write in third person limited point of view.
I'm fairly open to constructive criticism, although I generally don't go out of my way to ask for it except from my beta-reader.
Online tools I use:
Zoho Writer (where all my writings are stored for easy access from the four computers I use)
Dictionary.com (for the dictionary and thesaurus functions)
Gender Genie (for a quick, cheap check of whether the voice is male or female, as I usually write in third person limited)
Fanfiction Header Builder (for easy and coherent headers)
Wordle (because it makes pretty word clouds and I'm always looking for more ways to procrastinate)
Tags:
no subject
Date: Sunday, July 25th, 2010 22:02 (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, July 25th, 2010 22:27 (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, July 26th, 2010 16:00 (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, July 26th, 2010 21:00 (UTC)That's really good! I feel this is really the main point when it comes to fanfiction: KNOW YOUR CANON. I see so many people who haven't seen or read their canon in a long long while and would need a reminder, they fall in the trap of being OOC while trying to be in character, which ends up being very sad. I'm personally scared of using the main characters because of that. Minor ones seems safer.
no subject
Date: Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 06:53 (UTC)Another problem I've encountered is over-characterization: when a character is known for behaving a certain way, it's tempting to make them do that all the time. For example, one of the guys in my main canon is misled into believing that the word 'strictly' can be exchanged for 'definitely'. Which he does a few times on that day, and then maybe twice over the course of canon so far? But it still seems to be a staple of his dialogue in fic.
no subject
Date: Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 19:20 (UTC)It drives me nuts both because I think it's lazy characterization & because I really really want more fic to take him seriously as more than just a bundle of quirks that people think is fun to mock, or that just serve as an OTP stumbling block (oh look, he & Abe still can't have a conversation).
(Although that would require canon to do less of playing him for laughs. I think it's started to use him less in this manner to a degree... but yeah, something that irks me both in canon & fic.)
< / rant>