what does it mean to be loved by death?

hi im bowie im 29 and i love orphans. they/them.

i blog about romance novels, framing devices, death, cycles, identity, and zines+book arts. this is my ao3. this is my lbxd.

i come as a matched set with @obeetlebeetle.

Fiction is a kind of game, and reading is a way of playing. Each story comes with its own set of rules. Some of those rules are inherited from genre or the novelistic tradition. Others are local to the story. "In this story, animals can talk but no one can do magic." "In this story, people do magic but animals can't talk." "In this story, aliens live undetected among us." "In this story, the French Revolution never happened." "In this story, everything that happens is something that could happen in the real world, but you have access to the main character's thoughts." "This story is told in unattributed dialogue - the whole thing is people talking, and to understand what's going on, you have to figure out who's saying what." The reader must learn the rules and agree to them in order to play the game.

When we read, we make believe. We aren't duped or ensorcelled. Deep down we decide. We make ourselves believe. We know the characters in stories aren't real, but our feelings for them are. We know the things in the stories never happened, but we can't wait to learn what happens next. It's make-believe when adults take a photo in front of 221B Baker Street, the London address of Sherlock Holmes, which is marked by a plaque, installed in 1990, between 237 and 241. These people don't care that Sherlock Holmes is a fake detective or that (and I've double-checked my math on this) 221 is not a number between 237 and 241. They're making believe. So are the people who travel to Dublin on June 16 to follow the path through the city that Leopold Bloom takes in Ulysses. So is the reader who says, about the characters in a favorite series, "I feel like these people are my friends," or the one who finishes a long novel and keeps saying sadly, "I'm just going to miss living in that world."

So when adults read, we make believe too. It's just that kids are much better at it. For one thing, they're more adept at learning new rules - and not just because it's the way they play. It's the way kids live. When you're a child, every room you enter and every encounter you have is governed by a new and unspoken system of protocols that you must quickly divine. Mess up, and the results are disastrous: a tongue-lashing from Mom, or no dessert, or a week with-out video games. Dinner at home runs on one set of rules, dinner at a restaurant runs on another, and dinner at home with your mom's new boyfriend runs on a different set altogether. You'll be telling a story that would be perfectly fine to tell in the first two circumstances when you notice that your mother is glaring at you, horrified and furious: "We don't tell that story in front of Kevin!" And in that moment you learn how to have dinner with Kevin - and a little bit about your mom and that story too. That's what literary fiction is: It's dinner with Kevin.

Children are perceptive, flexible, and open-minded. They have to be. Childhood is a long series of experiments - testing out hypotheses and making adjustments. It seems only right that so much of the best children's literature is experimental too.

1. if you can just scrub the fan part from fanfiction to make it publishable, it probably wasn't a great fanwork and won't be a great standalone work either

2. there are only so many books that can be marketed and published by the mainstream industry. Do we really want the industry to be innundated with more slop that doesn't even do the readers of the service of being original? And are we ok with this stuff taking the place of original work? Like, literally the author of an original romance novel will be unable to publish because Random House bought their 10th Dramoine manuscript.

I respect fanfiction as an artform. I love reading it. I respect the authors who write it. But I do not think that any of the actually good, creative, and original fanworks are being published. First, because it is impossible to divorce them from the source material. Second, because any self respecting fanfiction author understands that their work cannot be divorced from the source material and still maintain the qualities that make it great.

i don't know how familiar you are with my blog. this is a topic i am regularly posting about, i am not brand new. i disagree with both your premises. first, there are as many types of fanfiction as there are iterations of any other literary form, and what makes fanfic "good" is not going to be monolithic, nor will it be a universally objective opinion. second, this is not how the publishing industry works, in my understanding. yes, a limited number of books are published each year. we are now in a serious rollback of diversity after the past decade of high highs. but a successful book in a given genre or imprint (which, maybe youve seen the stats that romance is one of the few sectors making any money) means more books in that area, not fewer. more of that author, more of comparable work, more of other authors willing to write into that genre as well.

please do not come to me and tell me what a "self-respecting" author would or would not do. i think that is a real red flag for lack of engagement in good faith. i have an enormous amount of respect for several romance authors who have published their fanfic, specifically because of the integrity with which they regard their own writing and the craft of romance. i am not interested in dismissing someone solely because of the career choices they have made or the subjects of their writing.