tappety-tappety

[ivyfic]

I wrote another 2,500 words of Constantine fic last night. This makes trinityvixen's holiday fic well over 7,000, and that's not counting all the stuff I've deleted and rewritten. This is getting out of hand.

(Seriously, do you ever find yourself writing and Chas is just whining and whining and you want to smack him and make him shut up? OK, maybe that's just me.)

I looked through my fanfic files and found that I have eight Constantine stories. Four that have been posted, the one I'm working on now, the 1character challenge fic, then two that have been put on indefinite hiatus. I reread them and found that I liked them, they were good, but they'd need a hell of a lot of heavy plot-lifting to get to were I could post them. I mean, I could see this one that's already nine pages just spinning out to eighty or a hundred or so and I'm just not ready for that level of commitment. I think I need magic elves to come write my stories for me in my sleep.

ETA: And then I stop and think - the Constantine fandom's pretty much dead. And none of these stories are slash. Which means even if I did write a hundred pages only about five people would read it. And then I sigh in defeat and try and remind myself I do this for the love of writing and not for worldly adulation - but really, that's a close one.

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

ETA: And then I stop and think - the Constantine fandom's pretty much dead. And none of these stories are slash. Which means even if I did write a hundred pages only about five people would read it. And then I sigh in defeat and try and remind myself I do this for the love of writing and not for worldly adulation - but really, that's a close one.

This is the hardest thing about any kind of fiction, but it burns me most about fanfic because there's so much more of it on my hard drive ::sigh::

I hate when fandoms go dead, and I'm still interested, but truthfully, I probably move on with everybody else most of the time, so there's no dwelling. What really annoys me is coming to a fandom late and having it have mostly died off. Not only do you not get the reader turnaround, you end up missing some of the most brilliant work out there because links expire and other readers give up.

Have you arranged a permanent folder for your fic graveyard? I have, and it's depressingly chock-a-block with stuff I'd be too embarrassed to post even if it was post-worthy (read: embarrassing fandom, cliche writing, melodramatic, plotless drivel that will never see the light of day). But it's fun to revisit, see what you can't pilfer or rework, see if you can stoke the fandom again.

Is Constantine a dead fandom because the movie's old or because there's not likely to be a sequel? Or both?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Fandoms based on movies are often as transient as Hoovervilles. For Constantine, I would credit the death of the fandom to two things:

- The emergence early-on of two types of stories: either heavy BDSM/noncon, graphically and horrifically violent and sexual bloodsport/rape/torture stories starring John/Balthazar; and, on the other end of the spectrum, cloyingly shmoopy John/Chas stories that ignore not only comic canon but movie canon as well and are at worst emo/Mary Sue and at best cutesy Harlequin novels that just happen to star people that look like Keanu Reeves and Shia LeBoeuf. To me, the Hellblazer verse is ripe for deeply emotional and psychological stories using the judeo-christian mythology to explore John's complicated relationship with God, religion and his own existence, but apparently to all the other fen it's an excuse to make people boink. Not an uncommon phenomenon in fandom, but in this case, the variety of stories early on that delved into more complicated characterisations dried up quickly and I'd bet most of those talented writers have run screaming from the fandom. Hell, I unsubscribed to a number of lists, and I'm still writing it.

-Then, as if that weren't enough, one of the emo writers, spurred on by her fellow talentless Mary Sue scribes, posted to the largest list that we were all a bunch of unfeeling cunts because we didn't give her enough feedback. After all, she's suicidally depressed, and we all are in Constantine fandom to stroke her ego. Personally, I'd never fb'd her because her stories sucked and she didn't finish them (thereby living by the first rule of fandom - if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all). This started a commenting firestorm for about 12 hours until the mod came on and deleted the post. After that, nobody's posted anything at all, really.

That's my understanding of what happened, anyway.

I'm thinking when this story is done I'm going to post it on the slash lists even though it's rabidly gen because those people are just starved enough for decent fic, they might not mind.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Not a bad idea, that way more than just I can squee over it.

Honestly, you should go to the GAFF forums. You can write, you've got genuinie "Don't you hate it when..." stories, I say, share it with the world.

The first reason you state for a fandom going under is all too familiar. I've gone through that nightmare and come out the other side into true horror at this point, in which fandom writers end up slashing or Mary Sue-ing the fandom to death then the fandoms die and come back again, born from the ashes only to repeat the previous incarnation's mistakes.

The second thing is actually not an uncommon occurance either, unfortunately. There was a Matrix themed RPG Michelle and I were on once in which this girl manipulated and lied to about thirty different people on the list, five of whom she actually was. To get attention, she pretended to be this guy who was all depressed, had an internet romance with one of the players then 'committed suicide,' sending the partner into therapy. It's now a left-for-dead RPG and has turned me off of ever participating in that rigamorole again (hence my utter failure to play at Milliways).

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, fun as it is to shake my head at fannish debacles, I don't feel authoritative enough on the subject to possibly invoke the wrath of fellow fen on GAFF. I wonder if getting negative feedback there would satisfy the complaining fan's need for fb.

What really burned me is that one of the fans who was like, "Yeah - nobody gives me feedback!!11!" was the author of a twenty-part AU Mary Sue, that as if that weren't bad enough, averaged 20 comments per chapter. Which means she was getting a crapload of feedback, and a hell of a lot more than pretty much anyone else, so to have her bitch about people not commenting was just cringe worthy.

I was going to post something to the thread that said "I wasn't fb'ing because I didn't have anything good to say about your stories, but if you really want feedback" then just pour my vitriol on the page. But by the time I cooled down enough to sanely consider writing that, the thread had been deleted. Which is all for the best, really.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. Sheesh, you're like my mother. Not picking fights and shit. Whatever d00d. Really, I subscribe to the "squash their egos before it is too late!" philosophy.

I think you'd do well on GAFF. There were pretty savvy people there, and some of them even recognized me as an author, too, and they are mad respectful if you're a good writer--it means they should listen to you when you say stuff is tripe or is wonderful.

Mary Sues will burn in hell, but the fun part is that so, too, will their writers.