Fandom Snowflake Challenge - Day 8

[elrhiarhodan]

Day 8
In your own space, post self-recs for at least three fanworks that you created. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Ahhhhhh, the dreaded self-rec challenge. How many years to I skip this one? Most? None? I don't know because I always have mixed feeling about self-reccing. On one hand, I can't help but here my mother say "Well, I love me, who do you love?" in those chiding tones, whenever I'd take too-obvious pride in something I'd done. And on the other hand, I know just how important it is to actually love what you create. My works (stories, art, non-fannish creative endeavors) are my children and I really do love all of them (even the ones that are made up of too many words).

So I'm going to use this space to recommend works that I love dearly but have not received a lot of love from fandom. And by a lot of love, I mean a story that's three years old, but has less than fifty kudos on AO3.

A note on how I'm picking these. For most of my fannish writing career, I'd published my works on Dreamwidth and LiveJournal first, and months or years later, I'd put them onto AO3, unless they were challenge works that had to go onto AO3 first. So there are a lot of stories which appear to have a low readership count to them, but that's because they are archived on AO3, and had gotten plenty of attention in their original publication. I'm also not including fics that, by their very nature, don't have a long shelf-life or would attract a large readership, like the hundred-plus MMOM ficlets I've written, or RPF, or the Tumblr-initiated drabbles that I've thrown up on AO3 for preservation.

And now, onto the self-recs and a whole lot of whining and ugliness:

1 - I am Not A Damsel In Distress (and I have been fighting the good fight) – The Ani DiFranco Remix.

Summary: Four things Charlie taught Diana (and one thing she learned all by herself) (White Collar).

Written in 2011 for the big pan-fandom challenge, Remix Redux, remixing Livrelibre's White Collar ficlet, "Four Things Charlie Taught Diana", this was the very first time I'd participated in any kind of pan-fandom challenge. Or any challenge, for that matter – I'd run my own writing fests, but I'd never written for a specific assignment.

I was, frankly, terrified that I wouldn't finish in time, or that I'd mess it up, or that I'd end up defaulting. Someone, I don't remember who, had told me to pick my remix target's shortest story and use that, on the theory that if you don't have a lot to work with, you won't get lost in the weeds.

It had been good advice, and I was able to find a story that gave me room to play with, to tease out new details and let me do homage without losing my own voice. It was also femslash, about one of the very few canon lesbians on mainstream TV at the time.

::RANT:: Although remix works rarely get a high readership, I think that this one had a remarkably low readership because the story was about a female character in a show with an overwhelmingly attractive male lead who was not a love interest, who happened to be a Black woman who had a canonically good childhood with loving parents and was in a healthy relationship with another Black woman. In the intervening years since I've written this story, I've come to see that as much as liberal fandom demands that creators put diverse characters front-and-center, when a writer actually does, no one wants to read it. :: /RANT::

2 - One Foot in the Graveyard (The Living in the Past Remix).

Summary: Back before jail and the FBI and everything else, Neal Caffrey makes a drunken bet with Matthew Keller - if he loses their chess game, he has to spend a day and a night with the dead. (White Collar)

This was written in 2014, also for Remix Redux, remixing Slytheringurrl's White Collar ficlet, "Lost". I wasn't expecting this to have a huge audience, having learned from my experience with I Am Not a Damsel In Distress that remixed stories have a very small readership and I was (or so I thought) okay with that.

That being said, the actual writing this story had been something of a very personal challenge. The original story had Neal exploring the catacombs of Paris of his own free will, but I remixed it so that Neal has to spend 24 hours in the Parisian catacombs, looking for pieces of a puzzle Keller had laid out for him. Now, I've been to Paris and I've very deliberately avoided any opportunity to go exploring the Empire of the Dead (even when my company had offered it as a tour choice for a free day during a business conference). Staying above-ground is important to me, since I'm claustrophobic to the point that reading about caves and underground passages freaks me out (and which is why I rarely take the subways in NYC). But I'm also committed to accuracy within a story and did a lot of research - watching videos of cataphiles (the French term for people who make a hobby of illicitly exploring the catacombs), reading articles describing the catacombs, looking at maps and photos of skeletons stacked up like cord wood and basically spending a lot of time being creeped out.

I'm still not sure why it didn't attract a bigger readership, remix origins notwithstanding. Neal/Keller had always been the White Collar fandom's favorite (and maybe only) hateship and other stories I've written with this pairing have been among my most popular. Maybe the summary or the title was off-putting? Or perhaps, like I said above, people just don't like reading remixes.

Anyway, this is still one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing and I'll love it forever.

3 - A Knotted Cord Untying.

Summary: Time is not a looped ball of string. Time is not a straight line. Time might be a tangled knot, unless time is simply an illusion. Or, what happens when Harrison Wells finds a copy his biography at the annual Stuckeyville Library Book Sale. (The Flash/Ed crossover)

This is among my earliest works in The Flash fandom, and possibly the first story that I wrote specifically with E-2 Harrison Wells. It's also a bit of a crossover with Ed, Tom Cavanagh big hit comedy series.

I don't really know what to say about this unloved story that doesn't come across as whiney, so I'm going to whine away.

At the time that I'd written this story, The Flash was a seriously new fandom for me. I mainlined Season 1 over Thanksgiving weekend in 2015, started writing EoBarry during the week between Christmas and New Year's, to gratifyingly satisfied audience, and finally caught up with the first half of Season 2 before the second half of that season started. I had fallen in love with the curmudgeonly E-2 Harrison Wells, although EoWells was still my ideal antagonist. This Wells was so surly, so not-nice, so much an asshole, that I'd thought it would be a clever idea to drop him into the world of Ed and Stuckyville, Ohio, where the titular hero had been the ultimate nice guy. I still do.

But it never clicked with the fandom. In retrospect, I think that the story is simply too obscure. It doesn't have any of the fandom's major ships (at the time, Barrison), and the connection between Ed and The Flash is really kind of preposterous.

But like all of my stories, my children, I have a deep and abiding love for it. Maybe someday, someone else will share that love.

Comments

[seleneheart]

I like remixes, frankly, and I'm interested in your stories. I had a chance to participate in one (either Stargate as a whole, or just SGA, but it was a John/Rodney fic), and I know what a challenge they are. But enjoyable!

[alessnox]

Those all sound really interesting. I haven’t seen any of the original shows though. I think that there are many reasons for low comment counts. One is the increasingly good number of TV shows out there. There used to be just a few everyone watched. Next, the growing number of fan works to choose from. It would be impossible for one person to read all of the works on AO3 and more are posted daily.
Anyway, I enjoyed hearing about your process.