I pretty much quit fanfiction about five or six years ago now, although I used to write quite a bit of it. A stupid hobby, sure, but any practice is useful and I think just churning out so many words and actually getting constructive responses (sometimes), and also seeing the different points of view other authors brought to the same subject helped my "real" writing even if I never do get published. You know, like how jogging a couple of times a week is good for you even if you never plan actually running a marathon.

I'd like to concentrate more on writing, so just out of curiosity I started poking around ff.net to see what was new and exciting in my old fandoms.

It was amusing. Of course everyone knows Sturgeon's Law - 99% of everything is shit - but what's funny is it's the same, pretty much exactly, as I was seeing years ago.

For example, take two somewhat similar (male) characters from different franchises, we'll call them Dr. A and Dr. B. - both are mad scientist types, and in canon Dr. A is either utterly oblivious to or seemingly faintly repulsed by romantic feminine attention, while Dr. B is outright vicious towards women. So naturally, a good chunk of the fanfics are "Dr. A falls in love with a female OC" and/or "Dr. B falls in love with a canon male character and they live happily ever after". Not that there's anything wrong with that, lord knows, but you almost never see other alternatives, for example, "Dr. A meets a female OC who romances him, but in fact Dr. A is asexual and continues to have no interest in bumping uglies despite her charms and effort" or "Dr. B falls in love with male character, who loves him back, but because he's a terribly damaged human being despite their honest best efforts they can't make it work". Change it up a little. And man, you almost never see characters who are any variety of asexual. Ah well. Maybe I just like depressing fiction? If this rant bugs you, imagine it being said by the cat in my ID.

I'm not excusing myself from the general crappiness of fanfic, understand. I know damn well when I steal someone else's toys to play with in my own sandbox it's because they weren't playing with them the way I wanted to. Actually, I had this problem in real life, which is why other kids didn't want to play with me (yet another example of how autism borks your life) so I mostly ended up bossing my younger sisters around (and yet they still love me . . . ah well, I did improve a bit with age) and playing with armies of tiny plastic animals and toy cars that I could direct in epic melodramas. So I guess it's either fanfic, or giving in to the urge to buy bags of plastic dinosaurs at the $1 store.


In other news, I FINALLY got a couch (well, a loveseat), I'm working on the last book cover and of course managed to get injured again (I think I'm cursed) and my sister is in Hawaii submarine-ing with sea turtles, the lucky wench.