fanfic geek-out: Back to Middle-Earth Month

[dragonlady7]

As a special treat to myself, I edited and posted this just now. I haven't posted any fic in ages and ages. But it's Back To Middle-Earth Month, for those diehard fans who still persist in their everlasting Tolkien love years and years after the movies ended and took with them their legions of ficcers (many of whom I still know and love, but don't know what the heck they're writing about now since I don't watch TV). Anyway, during March, a lot of people are posting Tolkien fic. So I figured I'd join in.

I have a Bachelor's degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. But I think I didn't really learn how to write for an audience until I put my original writings on hiatus and signed up for a LotR fanfic site and started posting fic online. I had the basic mechanics down, sure, but I just didn't know about things like, oh, pacing, or making a hook to draw the reader in, or even keeping my points of view from shifting. That's the sort of stuff fanfic readers will crit about, and if you do things like that well you wind up with a bigger audience. I learned a little about promoting myself. And it was the first time I ever even thought about putting a compelling title on my work.
So I will always have a special place in my heart for fanfic. And to this day it remains an important outlet for me. Fanfic has a more ready-made audience; because the fannish community will bring so much to anything you write, they'll be much more invested than in anything original you write.
Plus, publishing fanfic on the Internet is as much as you can ever do with it, whereas if you publish something original online it may not be publishable for money elsewhere.
Besides which, at least in the case of those who like me tend to write in either long or long-long form, it's much easier to create a small stand-alone story when it's fanfic and you don't have to worldbuild or give character background. You still get a good workout at telling a story, but you don't have to tell all of it.
It's not lazy, it's just a different sort of exercise. And writing for an audience is a powerful motivator.

The piece is posted at Henneth-Annun, which used to be closed and only publicly posted stories that had been through a review process, but now you can just mark things public and they go online. There was probably drama about this, and I vaguely recall that there was drama with the whole site on two or three occasions, but I kept myself away from it. I started posting there in '03 or so, and have just stayed there. I have other things posted in dribs and drabs here and there elsewhere, but I don't know where they all are. So regardless of your feelings on the website, if you're interested to read I hope you will anyway. And I hope it works-- I tested it on a different computer, not logged-in, and it worked for me.

"Like Fighting": Rated Adult for EXPLICIT het. 7400 words, Éomer / Lothíriel, on their wedding night. No plot to speak of, but hints of darker themes related to the larger stories I was writing back when I was active in the fandom. It is not light, fluffy, or kid-friendly, or particularly plot-heavy: it's best described as porn with introspection.

This is the stuff I'm writing lately, only this one happens to be publishable. This is the snippet I was thinking of posting with the names removed and asking if people could guess what fandom it was from, but I decided it didn't matter. I actually had written this with original characters and then find-replaced the names; the original characters are the ones I was going on in an entry a couple days ago, when I'd been writing a bit of fanfic, had find-replaced the names, and realized that it stood alone. So if this isn't what you were expecting... well, good.

And if you think that erotic Lord of the Rings fanfiction sounds like the worst thing ever, you probably shouldn't click that link, though I can set you at ease by assuring you it's neither slash nor self-insertion. (Either one would be a neat trick, given the subject matter.) So maybe you should take a chance and read it. It's smut, though, no doubt about that.
Yes, I'm a geek. Get over it. ;)

Comments

[frualeydis.livejournal.com]

Who's Lothíriel? I though, as a Tolkien nerd since 1979 that I knew all the female characters. Since I was a little annoyed at the love story in the films, since it clashed with the very early medieval epic style Tolkien was writing in I probably should avoid the combination erotica and Middle-Earth though.

/Eva

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

SHe appears only in the Appendices-- the daughter of Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, she marries Eomer in the last year of the Third Age.

I don't write in a very Tolkienian style, which is why most of the stuff i wrote was focused around the Fourth Age. It's not pseudomedieval at all, really. I can't do his voice, and I'm not so interested in the big thematic stuff as I am in the small human stuff anyway.
The films infuriated me in many ways, but they got the job done, so I guess that's all right. I watch them every couple of years and fast-forward through the parts I don't like.

[gypsum.livejournal.com]

So Henneth-Annun is no longer a semi-closed archive? That was one the better aspects of it, that there was essentially a peer-review process so less complete shite got published. Shite probably did get published but maybe slightly better shite than you might find on a website where any eedjit can write anything. Not that I have anything whatsoever to do with that world anymore. The last piece of fiction I wrote was my board paper in November (it is a 15,000 word piece you have to write at the beginning of your second year of PhD-ing, which gives a detailed historiography of your field and details your exact methods and sources. It's fiction because at that point, you have NO idea what the data actually tells you so when you get further into primary materials, you discard most of the board paper and your thesis is something only loosely related to it). I haven't written any fan fiction or any sort of non academic fiction for like four years. It was a good exercise, although I hazily recall weird drama and flame wars on websites like Henneth Annun. That was pretty lame.

I haven't seen the LOTR movies or read the books since a Tolkien class senior year of college. I should reread them, especially since I've lived here for a bit and Tolkien was writing with a very Anglo-centric perspective, so there may (or not... don't know) be things Americans might not pick up on.