At the age of 14, I finished my first novel length piece. For the standards of a 14 year old, I was told it was good.
So I edited.
And edited.
And wrote 5 full books in the series.
I got to college where people were older, wiser…more skilled.
And I got so used of being told that my idea was good, that it came as a shock when some people told me it was childish and poorly written…like a 14 year old wrote it.
I abandoned it for almost all of college. Got a degree in finance. Went to work as an analyst…which is still my job now, 3 years later.
I picked up the story again towards the end of college. And I decided – no, I won’t abandon it. I love these characters.
I just need to change them. And revamp this.
Use what I learned.
So I did.
I rewrote.
And here I am now. Close to being ready for betas. Hoping that my idea is at least somewhat appealing.
And since truly picking it up again this past year…I think, I’ve been more inspired, more in love…and maybe a bit happier?
I guess what I’m saying is…don’t abandon your stories. Accept they need change. And prove that you can change them.
Like any wicked sorcerer, he had expected to be caught eventually, but he hadn’t expected to be caught so soon.
He had barely even done anything yet! A string of unrelated hauntings, some casual arson… it was the latest supernatural technology that had proved his undoing; he was sure of it. The Paranormal Crimes Unit had traced his signature easily. He needed to be more careful about that. Evil gods, but he hated technology.
And now he was being exiled to Silicon Valley.
He would almost have preferred to have gone to jail. At least there were real ghosts there – proper haints, who’d died lonesome, painful deaths; they would have broken him out eventually. Which was probably why the government had stopped sending sorcerers to prison.
Instead, he was in a matrix of metal and glass that glimmered like a mirage, choking him, constricting him like the inside walls of a python.
He was the most unhappy sorcerer you’d ever seen.
There were ghosts here, of course. But not… the proper sort.
“And then Bethany got pregnant – out of wedlock – and gave the baby to her mother, and then Sadie showed up in the same dress she wore last week, and-”
“That’s very nice,” the sorcerer said, trying to hurry away from the translucent ex-starlet. “Don’t you have somewhere else to haunt?”
“Oh, no!” Said the glossy brunette – Abigail, her name had been – twirling a lock of hair around a ghostly finger. “You’re the most interesting person I’ve gotten to haunt since I overdosed fifteen years ago!”
The sorcerer sighed. It was just his luck. Not only was he sensitive to supernatural disturbances, but he also possessed a sort of ghostly magnetism. Ghosts followed him like he was a charismatic cult leader. Never mind that he possessed no charisma; or if he did, he never used it. Ghosts would flock to him from blocks away just to chat, and were easily influenced by his desires. It was why laying waste to the East would have been so easy…
“Hello?” Said a small voice.
The sorcerer looked around, but saw no one. He frowned.
Normally, ghosts never chose to be invisible to him. So it was improbable that- ah. He looked down.
The floating figure of a small boy stood just off to the side from where he’d been walking. He had wide eyes and fair hair, white under the ghost effect, with a curlicue over his forehead. He looked like a young cherub, or a baby angel.
The sorcerer’s nose wrinkled in distaste. He did not like angels.
“Hello,” he said politely. “How did you die?”
“I got run over by a limo,” the ghostly boy said, pointing at the street behind him.
The sorcerer looked further down. The boy’s legs were a mangled ruin.
“Ah,” said the sorcerer. “I suppose you have some unfinished business here, then – some unresolved anger toward the person who owned the limo? Or perhaps toward all limo owners?” He could work with this. Class warfare wasn’t his specialty, but any kind of anger was enough.
“No,” said the boy. “I’m just bored.” He scratched the back of his head. “I’m tired of always coming back to this same old street. I visit home every now and then, but nothing new happens. I want to go see new things.”
“Oh,” said the sorcerer. “Well… I intend to do some traveling in the future. Across the entire country, if I can manage it without getting caught. I suppose you would like to come along?”
“Yes,” said the boy, eyes widening. “I would love to.”
“Alright,” said the sorcerer. “Where’s your touchstone?”
“My what?”
“The thing anchoring you to your death here. Is it the street? The limosine? Your childhood home?”
The boy didn’t know, but a series of tests revealed that his touchstone was the bicycle he’d been riding at the time of death. The bicycle had been buried in some landfill a few miles away, where it would be nearly impossible to find.
The sorcerer sighed. He didn’t want to disappoint a ghost, even if it was an angelic little snot.
“Let’s go visit your parents,” he said. “Maybe they kept some part of the bike.”
– Inferno and Paradise Lost are Bible fanfiction
– anything written by Rick Riordan is technically world mythology fan fiction
– West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet fanfiction
– Pretty much all of Shakespeare’s plots are borrowed
– Laurence Block admits to getting heavily influenced by the media he consumes
– The Iliad is RPF
If you’re going to exclude fanfic because it isn’t original, that’s …a lot of stuff to be excluding, is what I’m saying.
This is the best explanation I could come up with for why it takes me so long to do updates sometimes when, at other times, I’m typing them up like clockwork.
shipping is a form of wish fulfilment. if you think it is sexy or cute for an adult to be with a child, or for brother and sister to be involved sexually/romantically, then you are a terrifying, disgusting human being.
Maybe I shouldn’t be jumping in on this, but I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff like this all over tumblr. And the main theme seems to be that we should shame people for how they ship fictional characters, because it… says bad things about them in real life?
Shipping is wish fulfillment the same way that writing fiction is wish fulfillment. You don’t always write what you want to have happen. Sometimes you write things because you’re curious, because you’re interested, because you want to know what would happen next. Sometimes you write because it’s messed-up and awful but it’s cathartic. Sometimes you write just because it feels… right. Always you write with a boundary between fiction and reality.
Occasionally the two overlap; you’d like to have a dashing gentleman or lady or nonbinary adventurer show you the world, and if you had the chance you’d sign up for it in a heartbeat. But you’re always writing with the recognition that what you’re writing isn’t real, and it’s valid to want to think something would be cool in writing or if it happened to your characters, but not to want anything to do with it in real life. You can write about characters who make friends with giant vampire bats even if you hate bats, and especially vampire bats. You can write characters who go to nature camp and grow and mature because of it, even if you hate camping and would never in a million years do it yourself. You can hate the military and still write, say, medieval fantasy or ancient Greek wars and describe how awesome fighting is and have detailed descriptions of battles that never condemn the organized violence in any way. That doesn’t mean you support violence, or wars, or that you have an idealistic notion that any military is perfect. It doesn’t mean that one of your wishes is for historical wars to have been so black-and-white, when there’s no way killing people could possibly have been that way. It just happens to be the story that you want to tell at the moment. You feel like writing it because why not.
(Note: If you’re writing problematic original content, though, like TERFs going around killing trans people, or nice Nazis, or glorification of KKK leaders, that’s something you should definitely reexamine and probably not publish, since it’s kind of a shitty thing to do.)
Shipping is even more like that, because you have characters that already appear in media and you know perfectly well they’re fictional and you want to see them kiss. That doesn’t mean you’d want to see characters like that kiss in real life. If you ship kinda friendly fictional enemies together, that doesn’t mean you’d actually want Trump and Kim Jong Un to get together in reality. If you think Sam and Dean should make out, that doesn’t mean you’d want actually existing brothers to bone. If you constantly draw and write fanart and fanfic of Sonic and Spongebob… okay, you’re weird. But it doesn’t mean that you’d… be… into… sentient hedgehogs and sponges? The good thing about fiction is that if you’re interested in seeing how weird shit plays out, there’s an option that doesn’t involve real people (RPF is another story, and I’m not going to get into that because I don’t feel comfortable weighing in, since I think it’s kinda sketchy to be writing fic about real people boning, but also the entire point of AO3 is to let people write whatever fiction they want as long as it is a fictional story. Honestly, I’m with Evelyn Beatrice Hall on this – I dislike incestuous and minor/adult ships, they totally squick me out, but if people want to write incest between adults, that’s not morally against all fanfiction website regulations. Minor/adult or minor/minor incest is something I’m just not going to weigh in on).
While we’re at it, calling people “terrifying” and “disgusting” just for how they interact with fiction isn’t going to persuade them of anything. They’re just going to get defensive of their ships and ignore you. This is highly unproductive.
This isn’t to say that people who ship things in fiction shouldn’t be subject to critical self-examination in any way (it’s always good to think about why you like certain things and to recognize their flaws), or to conclude anything about whether or not shipping or fanfiction has an effect on real people’s real lives. There isn’t enough evidence in either direction, and it’s not like it’s a thing you can measure or experimentally test. But seeing incestuous ships in fanworks isn’t going to convince grown adults that hey, you know what, it’d be cool to bone my brother! And ships with adults and minors should be a conversation left to kids and child abuse survivors, or people who as kids were affected by that kind of relationship; adults who’ve had relatively happy childhoods should probably stay out of it. Some child abuse survivors say that they write and/or read awful fic like that as catharsis; others claim it normalizes that sort of relationship and puts children at risk for adults trying to act on these desires; still others say it helps them through their problems and they wouldn’t have come out of the dark place they were in without it. As someone who’s never been sexually abused as a child, I can’t speak for these people and I don’t think I should, and neither should other people be trying to drown them out. Let’s let the actually affected speak, and not drown them out with our own delicate sensibilities.
Prompt Guy has been protecting us from the forbidden prompts for ages… prompts that are too horrible or strange to be shown to the amigos… but those prompts have just escaped from Prompt Guy’s inbox and are out for blood.
The older they are, the more power they possess. It takes two writers, each churning out the most wholesome misinterpretations they can, to bring down a year-old prompt. A two-year-old prompt might take a team of three writers and an editor, where the writers bicker constantly and complain of being underappreciated and the editor seriously needs a drink.
Ten years ago, a foolhardy young man posted a prompt involving sexual cannibalism, mpreg, and ritual sacrifice. It lurks in the shadows, watching its younger brothers and sisters and nonbinary prompt siblings be destroyed. Waiting for the teams of opposing writers to weaken, to give it a final opportunity…
I’m trying to fill out this questionaire and-
Do other people actually know how many years they’ve been writing fiction? Actually? Really?
I straight-up can’t imagine that.
I literally decided I was going to write a novel when I was seven. And then I wrote a self-insert series of short stories where I was the captain of a travelling hot air balloon with an annoying crew who never stopped bickering with each other and had a sentient bumblebee mascot. Does that count as when I started writing? Like… I’m not counting the story I wrote for first grade, because that was an in-class assignment, but… what counts?
Where is the cutoff? Is it when you first decided you would be a writer and wrote something for it? Is it your first project that you tried to get published? The first time you developed your own personal style? The first time you wrote something good? The first time you remember writing anything, period, that was an original work of fiction?
This isn’t meant mockingly or anything; I actually don’t understand how normal humans work, but it’d be cool if people could talk about when they ‘first started writing’ and why they consider that point to be when they first started but not any of the other points.
NineofShades 