abstinence is not immortality

You

The show with my blorbos is coming back this week. What I'm mostly feeling about it is mild panic. XD

There is soooooooo much stuff I was hoping to complete before this season started, including an original novella... because WHAT IF FANDOM EATS MY BRAIN AGAIN???

I am an adult-ass human. I feel like I should be at least nominally in control of where I allocate my time and creative energy. But historically, there is no evidence to support this! Not when it comes to Sherlock or Ted Lasso, anyway.

(Insert two nickels meme here -- it's so weird that this happened to me exactly twice? I've been obsessed with a whole lot of different media, but only twice have I fallen deeply into the transformative side of fandom... though I did also write a lot of Genesis fanfic as a teen without knowing that was what I was doing.)

Anyway, I've been working on an original novella about two fans meeting up in the future at a time when nobody meets up in person. I'm deeply enjoying writing it and excited -- I'd say I'm pretty obsessed! And yet, I am not BLORBO-OBSESSED. I have a great deal of affection for my original characters. But I don't think day and night about their feeeeelings or their dynamics or the ways they should be fucking, even though sex and feelings and interpersonal dynamics are all highly relevant to my story.

Nothing I write or think about my own characters can match the high I have felt thinking and writing about my past blorbos. Possibly worth noting that I've also felt a higher, near-blorbo level of obsession for characters in ASOIAF and Buffy and some other most-beloved media... but I guess because I wasn't in the transformative fandoms for those, the brain-consumingness wore off much faster for those. Anyway, I've cared about various characters in a way that surpasses anything I've managed to feel for any of my OCs, ever. Even OCs I wrote whole-ass novels about and spent years of my life on.

I'm not judging myself for any of this. Nor am I actually concerned about the prospect of getting pulled back into writing fanfic (I'm mostly poking gentle fun at myself). But I continue to be very curious about -- and entertained by -- my own brain. Brain, I have questions!

Why am I less feverishly obsessed with my own characters than with other people's characters (even though to be clear I am obsessed, just not blorbo-obsessed)?

And to a lesser degree: Why do I feel particularly out-of-control when it comes to exactly two (2) sets of characters? Why am I reasonably sure I'll feel compelled to drop everything to write for those characters and those characters only?

Okay, now I'm going to stop procrastinating close Tumblr and get back to sprinting to try to finish my draft of my novella, just in case my brain gets eaten again starting on Wednesday. XD But I'm curious to hear from other writers! Do you get obsessed with your OCs as much as with your fandom blorbos? Do you have observations about what makes certain characters take over your brain more than others?

Anyway, if I found out tomorrow that BBC Sherlock was returning in a month, I would definitely suffer similar concerns about my own fiction projects getting abandoned at a crucial moment due to this irresistible distraction.

I do love my own characters and stories very much, but I think time sensitivity is part of the issue? Like, I could pick up a 19th century novel and become completely obsessed with the characters, but it wouldn't cause my own writing to suffer because I could put it down and pick it back up whenever. But with tv shows and the like, if I know the whole fandom apparatus is going to be grinding to life now now NOW, then I want to be part of that, I need to read everything everyone is saying and follow all the BTS gossip and analyze every trailer and promo, etc... I wouldn't want to miss any of that, so that's a big part of why my own original work would suffer.

the love song of st. sebastian by ts eliot or the reichenbach falls

look, I don't know what this is except a loose bag of metaphor, but let me jingle it at you anyways

(the bow knows nothing more than the firm grasp of a warm hand, the arrow knows nothing except the world passing by, and sebastian knows nothing except exquisite pain and absolute devotion)