just stay with me a while 🌈🍖

Sharing these, mostly tags. Because all of it is so true.

Writers write for themselves, because they have a story and it needs to come out. But they share it because they want to be part of a fandom community, a group of people who will gush over this show and these characters with them. They are contributing to the community with their writing. If they don't get anything back, or only get very little back when they're investing hours of time and chunks of themselves served to you on a silver platter, they will eventually stop. As they should. Because any relationship with such a disproportionate exchange of energy is toxic. Seriously, why should they stay and keep contributing when they don't get anything back?

Fanfiction is community, it is an exchange, a converaation, engagement, not a content mill.

Star Trek, for instance, has endured for almost 60 years because people loved ToS so much, they made and shared fanzines full of their art and stories with others. They made and attended conventions. For years. Until finally TNG came out, 20 years later. And people kept engaging with it, so we kept getting more content. Because that's how it works!

If you want more stories to read about your favorite blorbos, then for the love of all that's holy, speak to the authors.

The writer or artist doesn't know this.

They have no way of knowing that you found their work beautiful and lifechanging or even just a bright spot on a bad day or that you think about it every day or that you told all your friends about it, and those things are great, but we have no way of knowing them! You may not be doing it intentionally, but you're excluding the writer or artist from the community feeling of fandom that you are carrying on (that is so great! fandom is a community! continue to talk and play!) even with their work.

If it's multi-chaptered I hope the next one gets more.

"He [Peter Cullen] has also stated that he had no idea of Prime's popularity until the character's controversial death in the 1986 animated film, because the studio had never given him fan letters from children addressed to Optimus. The public backlash over Optimus's death surprised producers greatly."

The writer or artist doesn't know this.

They have no way of knowing that you found their work beautiful and lifechanging or even just a bright spot on a bad day or that you think about it every day or that you told all your friends about it, and those things are great, but we have no way of knowing them! You may not be doing it intentionally, but you're excluding the writer or artist from the community feeling of fandom that you are carrying on (that is so great! fandom is a community! continue to talk and play!) even with their work.

We are not celebrities. We are peers.

Sometimes it feels like sending your heart into the void and never hearing anything back, but then you find months, years later that people were actually having fun with that part of your heart you've abandoned and forgotten about. All without you.

It's not just about inflating one's ego. I work pretty hard on trying to be as kind and approachable as possible in fandom spaces. I've even been excessively kind to people leaving negative comments on my work, to the point where others felt like they had to take up for me since I wasn't fighting back.

This is, tbh, something that takes active work and practice. It takes conscious effort. That effort's made worse by my OCD forcing me to recheck every message sixteen times so I don't accidentally send a bunch of personal insults and my home address along with the intended message.

Finding out that people are talking on private Discords about my work makes me feel like I've totally failed to be the kind, approachable person I have worked towards. I feel like a failure. Like I really must be so mean, or smug, or self-centered, that people are afraid to leave comments on my work. And even thinking THAT can send me into an OCD spiral, where wanting to see what was said is proof that I'm a selfish monsters who's just writing fic for the ego-trip.

You know, the kind of sentiments that people who "consume fanfic" (i.e., swallow it whole without offering anything in return) love to share when you criticize them for not leaving comments.

People have been doing book clubs since forever. They do not put George RR Martin on the phone so he can join the chat.

Oh, thank you, kindly court jester jingling into my life under the brave banner of anonymity, for illustrating the exact problem of current fandom.

(This ask is about this post about private fanfiction "book clubs," for those of you who are not following my jester's ire.)

The bedrock of the problem entrenched fandom is having with the newer "TikTok fandom" element is that we have a fundamental disagreement about what fandom is, and what is the social relationship between the people who write fanfiction, make fanart, etc, and the people who read that fanfiction and enjoy that fanart.

(I am not going to use the term "content creator." Because that term is not applicable to fandom, fanfiction authors, or fan artist. Kill the capitalist in your brain. Content is hummingbird nectar made with artificial sweeteners. It resembles the real thing at a distance, but it is devoid of nutrients. It will fill you up so you're not hungry while starving you. Generative AI can produce content because it's empty; it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't even want to engage with you. The sole purpose of content is to get you to sit still long enough for the people who own the platform to squeeze whatever it is they want from you out of you and then abandon your malnourished husk until the next time they can get something from you.)

George RR Martin is not a member of fandom, and the relationship he has with his readers is fundamentally different, because his relationship as an author is explicitly a professional one. When George RR Martin sells a book—not to his readers, but to a publisher who acts as intermediary—he is given a lengthy contract outlining the terms of the sale. How much he will be paid, what can be done with his work by who, etc. George RR Martin is not your peer.

Fanfiction authors are your peers. They're your next door neighbors. They write fanfiction to connect to other fans in celebration of a canon everyone involved loves. Nobody makes a single red cent from writing or sharing their fanfiction. George RR Martin has sold 90 million copies of his books, and he gets money for every one. Because TikTok has trained you that people who are putting their creations out there are monetizing the experience of you reading or watching their art, the "TikTok fandom" element has you sorting your peer posting fanfiction on AO3 into the same category as George RR Martin. But your relationship with George RR Martin is a professional one, and the expectation from fanfiction authors and artists is a social relationship.

When you have a private book club reading and discussing fanfiction without ever telling the author or, God forbid, leaving a comment about how much you enjoyed the story—which is the expectation entrenched fandom authors and artists who view fandom as a social relationship—you think you're reading a mass produced novel from someone who has already been paid for it several times over, but this isn't even Walmart vs. local mom and pop. What are you actually doing is going to your neighborhood block party, picking up the cake someone made and brought to share, and taking it back to your house to eat with friends.

We are your peers. We are your neighbors. We are doing this for free because we want to talk to you about our common interest. No, it's not "payment." We offer our work for free, and you have the option of treating us like vending machines or ChatGPT or Walmart. This is a social relationship; you have this option just as you have the option of leaving your shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot instead of walking it to the cart return. You have that option just as you have the option to stick your chewed gum on a park bench or park your car across three handicap spaces or take a shit on the floor of a public bathroom. How you treat your peers and neighbors, how you treat the people in your community, is up to you.

You can keep stealing cakes from block parties. But don't be surprised when people get fed up with it and stop having block parties. Then you'll be stuck buying cake from Walmart or consuming artificially sweetened hummingbird nectar from ChatGPT while vultures raid your corpse for data.

A discord fic club recently advertised they would be reading one of my fics. I was actually really excited about this! Hopefully new people get to enjoy a thing I worked hard to make for them, and I was really looking forward to hearing what they thought about it.

Except the advertised date came and went with silence on the actual fic, so I assumed that it got canceled or something.

But, no, it didn’t - I heard later that the group had in fact read my fic and apparently loved it. Quietly. To themselves.

And, like, look — I’m trying to write this with a minimum amount of snark, because on one hand I’m a fic reader too and I firmly believe that people have a right to enjoy fic however they wish. As I writer, I also don’t think I’m entitled to comments, but like 90% of writing fic for me is to be part of a community, and being a part of a community means commenting on fics so that there are more fic and the community continues.

On the other hand, as a writer, I have to be honest — hearing that people specifically scheduled time to read a fic I wrote and then loved it while not sharing any of their thoughts with me? That doesn’t make me feel good. I feel like it should, but it doesn’t. It makes me feel like my fic is just content to be consumed without regard to the effort that went into making it.

The fic in question? I worked on it on and off for literal years. It had to be betaed. It had to be formatted to be posted to AO3 properly, I had to work on the meta bits to properly tag and warn people.

All of that is work, and the only thing I ask for (and any fic author, really) is engagement and encouragement from the people reading the fic.

This isn’t snark or bitterness to say that if the trend is going to be people talking amongst themselves about my fic in a group chat with total silence to me as the author, then I don’t see the point in going through all the effort to post fic publicly. I’ll just send it to my own group chat. If that’s the community now, then that’s where I’ll go. I’ll hate it, honestly, but like. If that’s the deal, that’s the deal.

I can see this shit happening! I will all of a sudden have a week where I get a whole bunch of kudos on one specific story (like 20-50 people all at once, which normally only happens for recently posted stories), and it's like, "Oh, okay, I am the assignment for a book club this week," and that is all I hear about it. It's maddening.

I am a real human person. I am right here.

For December, we are once again teaming up with @hanukkahbingo to bring you some naughty prompts for the Festival of Lights!

@hanukkahbingo is a panfandom event so these prompts are open to anyone. This Tumblr will be reblogging all of the Tolkien-related content and @hanukkahbingo will reblog for any fandom!

Even if you aren't jewish feel free to participate!!

As always, any fic, moodboard, fanart, edit, etc is allowed to be submitted!

To submit: 1) Tag us @tolkienpinupcalendar and @hanukkahbingo 2) use the tag #tpc8nightsofsmut 3) use the smutmissions form here

Thank you so much @aimmyarrowshigh for working with us to bring you these prompts!

We look forward to seeing what you create!

here’s an article from brown university on the subject i’ll discuss further. there are 3 parts of practicing metacognition identified in this article: planning, monitoring, and evaluation. how might this look like for a fanfic writer? 

planning: asking oneself ‘what is my goal?’ ‘what strategies should i use to meet that goal?’ ‘how much time/length do i need to meet my goal?’. so maybe my goal is to write a meet cute where two characters kiss. i’ll need to use a perspective, an upbeat tone, and forward characterization to do this. it’ll probably take 5000 words and two days to write. 

monitoring: asking oneself: is my story making sense? am i reaching my goal, or do i need to summarize more succinctly to keep it to 5k? maybe you started with a lot of exposition and now you’re 6k in and the characters haven’t met yet. what went wrong/changed? is it ok that it changed or did you not realize it got away from you? what now? 

evaluation: asking oneself: did i reach my goal? was it effective? what would i change next time? 

this is where comments come in

it is incredibly difficult to evaluate yourself. comments like “i love this!” actually do begin to touch on the evaluation step of metacognition. it means, in general, the writer is on the right track. comments like “i loved the dialogue between x and y” or “the emotions of this section really hit me” begin to answer the questions of was it effective, did i reach my goal and conversely answer what would i change next time (by adding more of whatever was specified as working well). HYPER SPECIFIC comments, like analyzing the story between the lines or pasting in a line that you really liked and explaining why, is like jet fuel for the metacognition process and i’m not exaggerating. specifically pointing out what was effective and why is incredibly useful 

First of all: positive feedback absolutely is important and helpful to writers, or at least to me as a writer. It's actually more important, and gives me more useful information, than negative feedback. Constructive criticism is also useful, but constructive criticism, if you're doing it properly, incorporates positive feedback.

By this point in my life as a writer (if we're talking about fiction, I cannot call it a career, I am an amateur there) I can pretty much do my own critical feedback. Yeah, this is too long, it fucks up the pacing, I must grit my teeth and make it shorter. Doing this scene this way isn't working, I need to find another way. Too many clauses in that sentence, slow it down so the reader can follow the action. That kind of thing.

What I am really bad about is predicting how other people will respond to my writing. I know what *I* like about it, and usually there is some overlap between that and what other people like; but there's also usually a lot of divergence. No matter how accomplished you may be technically, the one thing you cannot do is read your own work from the perspective of someone who didn't write it. And this is why it's really valuable to get feedback from people who aren't you, during the process and afterward.

Pointing to things you liked about a story is helpful to the author even if you don't explain why you liked them. It lets us know what's working, and that is as important to know as what isn't. Cause you don't want to take out the things that are working because of some rule you're trying to follow regarding the things that aren't.

And also, the positive reinforcement helps with motivation, especially at the WIP stage. It's always been really helpful to me to know that people are reading and enjoying the story while I'm working on it; I am willing to disappoint myself by not finishing something but not to disappoint other people!