So.... I promised myself I would never speak of my dorky fanfiction experiment again...
Apparently that was a lie. Huh.
I posted it up on Fanfiction.net on Saturday. I kept working on it during the weekend and it ballooned up to 6 chapters, but nobody was reading it. That wasn't a surprise. Actually, that was part of the plan. It's scary to let internet strangers read your stuff.
Last week during my grant writing madness, I also finally signed up for a DeviantArt account. That website is more geared to... well.... art, but there is a fanfiction section... I didn't get the account with intent to post anything. Actually, I didn't even have a fanfiction when I got it. I wanted an easy way to save my favorite pictures (there is some gorgeous work on there!) and pinterest wasn't cutting it.
During the process, I liked a fanfiction in the same category that I ended up writing in. Apparently in DeviantArt etiquette, it's polite to thank someone who favorites your work, so the author popped onto to my wall to thank me. I thanked her for her awesome story and admitted I like her version way better than the real thing.
And then I got brave and posted just the first chapter of my fanfiction. DeviantArt is way harder to navigate than fanfiction.net. I've been reading fanfiction since 2004 (at least, that's when I made my account!) so I know that site pretty well, and it's easy to upload stuff. (Makes sense, since it's an all-text website.) DeviantArt... man, that was a tough one. I thought of asking some friends for help, but I was way too embarrassed to do that because then THEY'D SEE WHAT I'D WRITTEN. Hahaha.
Anyways, author girl popped back up on my wall to thank me again for my nice compliment.... and she saw what I'd posted! And she submitted it to a fan group for that particular topic! And she favorited it, and told me she liked it and hoped to see more.
Do you see the exclamation points building!!! Hahaha... I liked that feedback way more than I should. By the end of the day, I had 3 readers. I mean, on the one hand that's like, pssssh, hardly anyone. But I am so excited anyway!! Three people read my work (from 1 o'clock in the morning, nonetheless) and they liked it!!
One of those people is THE number one fan of this fandom. No really, it's true. It's not the biggest fandom in the world... She has more fanart and fanfiction than anybody else, she's met the writers behind the scripts and even did an internship with them, so she knows lots of plot details no one else knows (because when she was geeking out over this thing, she was right there with the creator to ask him whatever questions she had and get real answers.) Anyway, I've read her stuff a lot and really liked it.
And she favorited my dumb little fanfiction! And talked for a while, I think our comments went back and forth for 4-5 times.
I was so excited by all this silliness, I ended up getting inspired to write a new, better chapter 2 than what I had posted on fanfiction.net originally. Already it has two favorites (from two of the three who liked the first one) and number one fan girl is now following all my posts on DeviantArt.
It's not a big deal at all so why am I so excited?!? (Oh yeah! It's because I'm a DORK!) Apparently I needed to get my writing up on the internet before this, I guess.
All in all... I think this is a good experience that will help me with my own book. It's giving me a little more confidence in my abilities as a writer. And it's helping me take a step back and analyze some of my strengths as a writer.
There's a lot I need to do to improve, but you know what? I'm semi-decent at tugging people's heartstrings. I know how to pack an emotional punch. I know a bit about human relationships and how we all get so tangled up in how we relate to other people, it impacts everything we experience and feel and do.
That's what I'm doing with this fanfic. And that's part of what I want to do with my book.
Part of my problem is that my two greatest strengths (well, at least what I like to write the most) are polar opposites: family drama and ridiculous off the wall humor. It's hard to mix the two without getting serious mood whiplash in the narrative.
Oh well. I'll figure it out somehow. :)
Good for you! What fandom is it?
ReplyDeleteHaha, thanks! It's so dorky but I'm loving it.
DeleteThe fandom is... The Secret of Kells, that movie I wrote about not so long ago. It's an Irish animation film from 2009, so there's not a lot of fans and most of them haven't contributed anything new for a while. And there I am, geeking out hard core hahahaha.
A key part of its story line is this tortured relationship between an orphaned boy and the uncle who is raising him... and my novel focuses on the tortured relationship between an orphaned boy and his grandfather, so that sort of thing just really spoke to me. I'm retelling the whole thing from the uncle's perspective, because he comes off as a bit of a jerk in the film, but if you pay close attention, you can see he's really a good guy.