Category Archives: Fanfiction

Menus

02 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by in Fanfiction, Randomness

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Long story, but I posted a bad link on fanfic.net and it’s going to take me a while to fix it and post a better one there. So in the meantime, just in case: Menus at the New York Public Library (This is an incredibly fun site to browse if you’re interested in food and history.)

I’m having far too entertaining a time writing Doctor Who fanfiction. I suppose it’s good that I’m enjoying writing in any way, shape, or form, and I should just be happy about that. But it does mean that I ought to start looking for a serious job. If what I need to write needs to be free, then I need to also figure out some way to eat. In three months, R finishes school and both of us are set free. In my case, for the first time in decades, my job doesn’t need to be boundaried by his school being my first and foremost responsibility. In his case, the future awaits. Whee. Sort of. Change is always both exciting and scary, and this sort of change is about the biggest there is. I think it’ll be … interesting … for both of us. Also, I think I’ll pour myself another glass of wine before thinking any more about it.

Random other note: Amanda Palmer’s TED talk? Crazy beautiful. Also scary. I am not that brave. Just…not.

Edit: It amuses me that I used “free” to mean both without cost and without responsibility. They’re both different and yet not.

The Rational Harry Potter

21 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Fanfiction

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If you like Harry Potter and if you also like science, then you absolutely must read this: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

It is brilliant. No, really — incredibly, amazingly, scarily brilliant. It takes some of the history and most of the world of the Harry Potter series (the settings, the politics, the wizarding war) and gives them a twist, resulting in a totally different story. It’s Harry Potter as if Ender Wiggins from Ender’s Game was the hero.

It is also incredibly funny. I laughed out loud, literally, more than once and a couple times so hard there were tears in my eyes. It’s over 500,000 words long so a serious investment of time, but worth every single minute. It’s the best thing I’ve read in…I don’t know how long.

A little tiny sample:

“I… see,” Professor McGonagall said. “And if, perhaps, you were to discover the entrance to Salazar Slytherin’s legendary Chamber of Secrets, an entrance that you and you alone could open…”

“I would close the entrance and report to you at once so that a team of experienced magical archaeologists could be assembled,” Harry said promptly. “Then I would open up the entrance again and they would go in very carefully to make sure that there was nothing dangerous. I might go in later to look around, or if they needed me to open up something else, but it would be after the area had been declared clear and they had photographs of how everything looked before people started tromping around their priceless historical site.”

Professor McGonagall sat there with her mouth open, staring at him like he’d just turned into a cat.

“It’s obvious if you’re not a Gryffindor,” Harry said kindly.”

Yes, it’s a Ravenclaw version of Harry. He calculates the odds, he thinks ahead, he uses reason and Bayesian probability and …  really, you should just go read it right now, because it is that good. No, even better than that. Really.

Inappropriate

27 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Fanfiction

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I got a message from fictionpress that I should have ignored, but couldn’t.

This person Inappropriate sent me a private message that said — and I quote —
“Hi
can i talk?
thats me in my profile picture”

to which I responded, “If that’s you in your profile picture, does your mother know you’re writing to strangers online? Because I want to call her up and tell her she’s being negligent — and you should know better! And no, we cannot talk. Get offline and behave like an appropriate eight-year old.”

And I still feel angry. I have no idea who that is but I am quite sure, he/she/it is not the person in the picture and whoever he/she/it is, using a little kid’s picture like that is disgusting. I feel slimed just by the interaction. And also furious. I wish I could call someone — if not a mother, better yet the police. And just the fact that someone so sleazy would respond to something I wrote makes me want to throw things.

Writing fan fiction

17 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by in Fanfiction

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Or maybe this post is really about publishing fan fiction? I should write about writing fan fiction, too, and maybe I will at some point, but this post is really about publishing it, and maybe about publishing in general. Ever since I got obsessed with Eureka last fall, I’ve been writing and posting stories at Fanfiction.net, along with thousands of other people.

Not thousands of people for Eureka, alas — the most popular fandoms (<–ooh, look, new vocabulary) are Supernatural, Glee, Harry Potter, Twilight. (Momentary digression, Supernatural? I think I saw that show once. But it turns out that its fan-community is obsessed. They’ve written something like 49,000 stories about their beloved show. I have wondered if they’re cheating and writing a lot of one-shot super-short stories just to get their numbers up, but I haven’t wondered enough to read a lot of them and find out.)

And back to my point. I’ve written 9 real stories, ie long stories, and a couple of shorts that are just scenes. It has been really fun. The writing has been amazing — more on that later,  probably — but the posting has been scarily validating.

Wow, do I have an external locus of validation problem or what? Getting a nice review can make me happy for hours. It’s the best drug ever. In the abstract, I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t need other people’s approval to enjoy writing. And I don’t really — the writing part is fun no matter what. But the approval is so satisfying. Knowing that someone enjoyed what I wrote makes the writing even better. And it isn’t that it makes me feel like a better person or that it is validating in the sense that it changes my self-image, but there’s something about knowing that I made someone laugh or squeee (<–also new vocab, but I’m pretty sure it’s an onomatopoeia) that just brings me joy. It makes me want to write more and more and more. I could use the joy.

(Endoscopy for mom today; colonoscopy on Tuesday. Liver cancer and pancreatic cancer are words that are being bandied about. I like those words even less than suspicious nodule.)