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I know the year isn't even half over, but it's been one of the best fannish periods I've had in a long, long time. Writing is fun again. I look forward to it instead of seeing it as penance, a bargain struck in return for my continued existence. Alternating stories keeps the characters fresh and setting a page count instead of a hard word count keeps me from getting pissy and resentful and feeling stifled by the ridiculous amount of time I spend chained to this keyboard.
No longer posting my fic to LJ has also helped. I don't have to come here in the days after posting a chapter to find dust and tumbleweeds and obsess over my declining skill and fading talent and wonder what's wrong with my fic, why aren't people reading, oh, my God, what if I'm a hack? I can post it to AO3 and FFN.net and get a few kudos and a smattering of comments and call it good. I don't have to sing for my fandom supper here anymore and worry about being interesting enough to keep readers. I tried that for years and got very little out of it except anxiety and frustration, so fuck it, I'm going to post words counts and dumb Youtube videos and Karl Urban pictures, and when the mood takes me, I might talk about two virgin priests breaking their vows and having hungry, clumsy sex or a lonely, touch-starved John Kennex falling in love with his gimpy neighbor but being too afraid to tell her so. Or about a Starfleet doctor having a forbidden love affair with his gimpy, time-traveling patient while James T. Kirk gives not a single fuck and surreptitiously roots him on or lovelorn elves reunited after thousands of years apart(yes, I'm still working on that). Or improbable, unapologetically iddy Dredd h/c. Fandom is not serious business; it's supposed to be fun, and I'm going to act like it.
No longer posting my fic to LJ has also helped. I don't have to come here in the days after posting a chapter to find dust and tumbleweeds and obsess over my declining skill and fading talent and wonder what's wrong with my fic, why aren't people reading, oh, my God, what if I'm a hack? I can post it to AO3 and FFN.net and get a few kudos and a smattering of comments and call it good. I don't have to sing for my fandom supper here anymore and worry about being interesting enough to keep readers. I tried that for years and got very little out of it except anxiety and frustration, so fuck it, I'm going to post words counts and dumb Youtube videos and Karl Urban pictures, and when the mood takes me, I might talk about two virgin priests breaking their vows and having hungry, clumsy sex or a lonely, touch-starved John Kennex falling in love with his gimpy neighbor but being too afraid to tell her so. Or about a Starfleet doctor having a forbidden love affair with his gimpy, time-traveling patient while James T. Kirk gives not a single fuck and surreptitiously roots him on or lovelorn elves reunited after thousands of years apart(yes, I'm still working on that). Or improbable, unapologetically iddy Dredd h/c. Fandom is not serious business; it's supposed to be fun, and I'm going to act like it.
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