#and how almost invariably a fic writer's post about their work will never be shared as much

[aresmarked]

the fact it’s a for-profit writing AI really, really gets my goat, along with the feeling of bitter inevitability that’s been rising with all the troubles visual art siblings have been having. torn between ‘it’s only been a matter of time’ and ‘it never had to be like this’.

[darkest-fluid]

Fic ask game: 1,2, 6, 8, 18, 23

You always pick such great questions!

1: Is writing cathartic or stressful for you?

I would say it's about equal parts of both. Often the process of writing can be very stressful for me, but that isn't because I don't enjoy it. It's more to do with my mental health difficulties. Anxiety, adhd, executive dysfunction, maladaptive perfectionism and imposter syndrome amount to a fairly potent mix of obstacles when it comes to creative projects. That said, when I actually do get things written, getting to look back over it and see that I've made something is a very cool feeling, especially if I manage to write anything that accurately captures the mood or message that I wanted to convey. So it's difficult, but the end result is always worth it.

2: Do you focus on attention to detail when you read fics? Are you more or less attention to detail focused when you write fics?

I'm a very detail oriented person. So much so, in fact, that I corrected a spelling error in this question after I pasted it, because looking at it was bugging me. 😅 I do pay a lot of attention to detail when I read, and I always appreciate when an author puts thought into things like subtext and realism and character motivation, but I'm not hunting for mistakes or trying to be judgmental or anything. I think I'm probably more detail-focused as a writer than as a reader, given my writing habits. Perhaps a little too detail focused, at times.

6: What are some topics you will never write about?

Oh, that's a tough one. I honestly feel like there isn't much that I would avoid, if the circumstances were right. There are topics that I would not write in certain ways, but if I had free reign to handle it my own way, then I could be open to almost anything. Incest would be extremely hard, I think, because I used to be in a relationship with someone who was an incest survivor and so that topic is very touchy for me. But I could still write about it if it was important to the story and I was able to treat it delicately. I think really the boundaries for me are more in the portrayal than in the subject itself. I would never fetishize anything that I find traumatic or upsetting, which is one of the reasons I tend to avoid unbalanced or abusive power dynamics in erotic fiction.

8: How do you develop your OCs?

It isn't always exactly the same every time, but I generally start with a broad concept and then flesh out the details. Often that concept will have some kind of symbolism tied to it. For Lyr, I started with my actual BG3 OC, who was a rogue (because I love to play rogues.) And then I thought about what kind of story I wanted to tell, and the symbolism of water and the ocean really appealed to me. Emotions, depth, freedom, hidden things, forces of nature, etc. Blood also contains water, and water has symbolic ties to telepathy. I think about those kinds of things in the early stages, and then I start to form an actual person out of it. Usually I try to give that person some qualities that go against stereotype. I also invariably give them at least a few qualities that I can identify with, as that makes it easier for me as an author to inhabit the character. Understanding their emotional temperament is important for me, since I tend to write from a more emotional/impressionist POV. So I spend a lot of time fine-tuning that. Figuring out their motivation is an important step, also. What does this character want, both in the short term and more broadly? What do they believe in? As for backstory, I will usually figure that out as I am building their personality. I don't do one and then the other. I'll start with a rough idea for character traits, then I'll write some basic backstory notes, then I'll use that to expand and refine the personality, then I'll write some more backstory, and so on. Each informs the other.

18: Do you feel like your work gets enough recognition? What kind of feedback do you like to receive?

What I hope for, with my writing, is that it will resonate with the people who read it. I think that's really what recognition means to me: knowing that someone read my work and was able to get something from it. It makes me feel like I'm connecting with people, even if very distantly. I feel very grateful and lucky that there are people out there who read and enjoy my work. Even if that number was very small, it would still make me happy. So in that sense, yes. I am happy with the recognition I receive. I love getting feedback about specific things within the story that a reader enjoyed or derived meaning from, and I love getting to see what kinds of details people pick up on.

If I'm being 100% truthful, I do feel a bit sad sometimes that the people who know me in person don't have any interest in reading my work. (I probably would not show them my fanfic, but I have plenty of original writing as well.) I always really enjoy getting to see the things my friends, family and partners create, so the lack of interest from them is hard for me sometimes. Though it's less about recognition, and more about the lack of connection. Writing is such a personal thing. Sharing it with people is like sharing a part of yourself, and I wish I could share more with them.

23: What's one piece of advice you would give to anyone who wants to start writing or posting their writing online?

Writing is like any other skill: the more you do it, the better you will get. It took me around 15 years before I hit a point where I started to really be happy with my writing ability. If you find that you're struggling to get in enough writing practice, collaborative writing (including text-based roleplaying) can be an awesome way to motivate yourself. And if you're looking for tips and feedback, writing workshops, writing groups and beta readers can be incredibly valuable tools.

Another bit of advice: don't apologize for your writing. If a reader likes your story, they will focus on the bits they enjoy. Drawing attention to the flaws will only serve to make them more obvious. Let the work stand on its own.

[devoverest]

Getting to know me: a novel

@ignisgalaxia @imaginationdrift @bizships @lodessa and @streepmulgrew  have all tagged me for this, and I just can't take the peer pressure any longer. However, I'm so long-winded everyone will surely be very sorry that you five ever asked me. I will try very hard to put most of this below a "read more" link, but my mobile app doesn't play nicely with that feature any longer, so I truly deeply and sincerely apologize if yours doesn't either and you get a callus scrolling past all of what follows on your way to the gifsets you're on Tumblr to enjoy.

1. Relationship status: married -- legally and everything. It was the mid-'90s. I was considering having a religious ceremony but forgoing the state-recognized marriage license part, in solidarity with same-sex couples who at the time and for many years afterward were denied that privilege. However, my father absolutely put his foot down (something he almost never did with me, especially in my young adulthood) and insisted on the marriage license. He supported marriage equality, but he was thinking of my economic security in case our marriage didn't last. He was right to do, as I ended up taking many years out of the paid workforce to raise children, which I hadn't planned on doing when I decided to marry.

In case Tumblr is stupid, right here is where I’ve inserted a “read more” link as I’m writing this post. I tried. 

2. Lipstick or chapstick: Usually neither. Actually, never literal Chapstick because that stuff is made out of petroleum and isn't good for your skin. I learned that when I was playing a lot of flute in high school and college and had to take extra special care of my lips to play well. If the weather gets really cold and dry, which it rarely does where I live, and if I can hang on to any of the half-dozen tubes I buy every year but which invariably get swiped and then lost by family members, I use a Burt's Bees lip balm. I seem to have a knack for finding them barely-used in the bottom of my purse during the warm months and then never having one at hand when I actually need it. I think I own one lip pencil currently and I'll sometimes use that to outline my lips when I'm doing some sort of special-event public speaking kinda gig but I don't wear any make-up normally. My husband claims that I knew full well it was a date the first time we got together socially because I wore make-up. I have never admitted to him that he is correct, but he is.

3. Three favorite foods: Too many to narrow down to just three. I enjoy and appreciate a wide range of foods. Things I enjoy and appreciate perhaps a tad more frequently than I ought to in the strictest interests of nutrition are chocolate in almost any form, ice cream (especially that of the chocolate persuasion and most especially any form of peanut-butter/chocolate), and Starburst brand jellybeans, which my son and I share somewhat ritualistically most evenings after dinner (which is somehow not the same thing as for dessert.) Why yes, I do have a sweet tooth -- why do you ask?

4. Song stuck in your head: Currently "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" by Bachman-Turner Overdrive (I had to google that.) I don't know why but suspect it was on TV this evening, which makes me fear that it may be the campaign song for some politician I would never vote for. Which reminds me -- US citizens, please double-check that you are registered to vote and make a plan for voting in the upcoming midterms! This will probably the most important election of your entire lifetime, past or future, no matter what your age, and in many races in many states, voter turnout will be the single deciding factor in who controls the future of our country for a very long time to come. Please vote!

5. Last movie you watched: "Crazy Rich Asians," with my husband, unwisely just two days after I had minor (but surprisingly butt-kicking) surgery. We went to the first matinee showing on a Saturday and actually arrived at the theater before it even opened, a sure sign of mature middle age if I've ever heard of one. We both loved the film -- it was glitzy, funny, extremely well-written and -acted, got all the Chinese cultural details right, offered caricatures but no stereotypes, was very female-centric and multi-generational, and of course starred the exquisite and inimitable Michelle Yeoh who also plays Philippa Georgiou on Star Trek: Discovery. Laughed until my belly hurt (literally, sadly) and then went home and slept the rest of the day.

6. Top three shows: This will sound really strange for someone who is on Tumblr because of TV show fandom, but I don't watch TV. I grew up with Star Trek TOS reruns and movies, then TNG in college & grad school, then Voyager until extended stays abroad made it impossible to keep up with (back in the days before streaming and VPNs.) I reconnected with Star Trek in summer 2017 when I was home alone for six weeks and binged all of Voyager and then started digging up fanfic for all the reasons all the Voyager fans turn to fic -- to fix what the show's writers mutilated -- and now here I am, but I don't watch TV, and when I do it's the nightly news or whatever sports my husband is watching and then it's just because I feel like sitting in the same room with my husband at that particular time. The one exception to this fact about me is that I did watch Star Trek: Discovery as it was being released last year, and even got my teenager into it. (He is a Netflix addict but never watched any Star Trek anything before that. I don't know where I went wrong with this child.)

7. Books I'm currently reading: Eternal Tide by Kirsten Beyer because @voyager-book-club; Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (audiobook but I'm counting it); Five Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. LeGuin, Soul at Work: Spiritual Leadership in Organizations by Margaret Benefiel; Pachinko by Min Jin Lee; and Selecting and Using Breastfeeding Tools: Improving Care and Outcomes by Catherine Watson Genna. Except that the last three books on the list are ones I have at hand and keep wanting to read but haven't so much as opened yet. But including them gives you a more complete sense of my interests.

8. Last thing I googled: "you ain't seen nothing yet lyrics" because #4 above. Before that, "instant pot beef stew recipe." No need to look further back in my search history (she said during a break from writing smut.) *whistles innocently*

9. Time: 10:30pm as I write this. No idea when I'll post it or when you'll read it. This seems like a silly question to include for a post of this nature.

10. Dream trip: India. But I've also never crossed the equator and really feel I should someday, so who knows, maybe I'll find a way to drop in on all the Australian friends I've made in Voyager fandom. Now wouldn't that be lovely?

11. Anything you want: Anyone who knows me in real life (and anyone hanging around the Voyager Book Club discord server) knows I never shut up about breastfeeding support and advocacy. But I always try to make it clear that I'm not preaching at parents about how they should feed their babies; rather, I'm working to help parents who want to breastfeed overcome any challenges they encounter. I save my preaching for the folks involved with policy and institutional barriers to breastfeeding, and when it comes to the unethical and demonstrably harmful advertising practices of the infant formula industry, my preaching leans hard toward the hellfire and damnation variety because that is some truly evil shit, folks -- the advertising practices, not the formula milk itself; let's be very, very clear about that.

Rules: Tag 15 people you want to get to know better.

Here I shall echo @imaginationdrift: "(Really?! That sounds like a number chosen by an extroverted maven.) / Ok, here goes. / FEEL FREE TO: never complete this. I won’t be disappointed, promise." Also, apologies to those who have already responded -- feel even freer to ignore. 

@garrulus  @rikerssexblouse  @klugtiger  @ussjellyfish  @kate-coleman-writes  @lameraextranjera  @armitagetrekkie  @warp6  @admiralkatcornwellfan @zjofierose  @writtenndust @trekkiefeminist @quirkette100 @nerdfishgirl @hoidn

[femslashrevolution]

On Experience and Scarcity

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

First and foremost: the subject of this essay has been banging around my mind for a long time, but trying to put it into words turned out to be difficult. It wasn’t until I read Holyfant’s’s excellent essay, towards a “darker” femslash, that I found my starting point. Even so, I often struggle to find the right terms and language to describe my own personal experience, so I’m going to ask for a little leeway here.

Holyfant’s essay mentions three main reasons why people hesitate to write femslash. If I can (roughly) paraphrase: the first reason is the fact that compared to M/M fic, F/F is a niche fandom with relatively little feedback opportunities; the second is a  lack of interesting female characters and F/F relationships in canon; and the third is the feeling of responsibility that comes with writing less-than-perfect women. Holyfant focuses on the third point, which is an issue all of its own (and one that’s also echoed in havingbeenbreathedout’s “On the personal as normal; on the normal as political”.) But personally, I’ve always felt like I’ve been more influenced by the second reason. The consequences of what we write, the fear of the way we write a character having widespread consequences – that’s something I am, in a way, already a little used to. I’ve written a lot of what I’d call dubious shit; I’m used to dealing with the fear of consequences of writing things that could be generalised. Whether it’s women who are less than perfect or relationships seriously veering into the abusive, I’m always of the opinion that my audience is smart enough to see nuance and not to generalise. My own main problem isn’t really the political repercussions of writing femslash, if you can put it that way.

My problem is the canon material.

I’m speaking from my own experience here– I have no way of knowing how widespread this particular problem is. On the other hand, I’ve seen enough people write musings and reactions about similar issues to suspect I’m not just the only person struggling with this.

Anyway. Let’s start with my backlog of fic. AO3 tells me that right now, I have twice the amount of M/M fics compared to F/F fics. Looking at it by wordcount, it gets even worse. The longer ones, the intense ones, are always inevitably male/male ships.

This used to annoy me a lot. I couldn’t understand why I kept going for the male pairings. Had I really internalised this kind of misogyny so badly, that I couldn’t see the potential of female characters? Was I a Bad Feminist for ignoring the stories about women and focusing on men? I was a little disturbed at this clear trend in my own writing, yet I couldn’t really find a way to fix it – because I couldn’t find any femslash pairing that really inspired me enough to write about in great depth. But why? Why did female pairings fail to intrigue me? Was this really just internalised sexism?

Well, maybe. But there were other factors at play here too, ones that took me a while two discover. Two things helped me find them.

The first was genderswapping. The second was Person of Interest.

Genderswapping – shorthand in this context for taking a canon cis male character and creating a cis female version of him, also known as spectrumslide – is something that I find really interesting. I know there are a lot of people who are opposed, who see it as a way to drive out actual canon women in favour of male characters, never mind the gender change. But for me, there is no better tool to challenge the way you think about gender and personality and relationships, and how they’re all subconsciously intertwined.

When I read genderswapped stories, I often got annoyed at how far the female versions were from their male counterparts. Traits that I enjoyed were changed, or warped, or erased altogether. These stories didn’t appeal to me at all. On the other hand, some other writers created characters that did appeal to me, massively. Because they weren’t like others I’d read about before, because they possessed the same traits that attracted me to their male counterparts. Genderswapping offered me female characters unlike any I’d seen before in mainstream fiction. Rough around the edges. Unemotional. Violent. Aggressively sexual. Bitterly sarcastic. Nasty women, if you will. Women that seem to be the opposite of everything that’s traditionally associated with femininity.

(It’s probably important to note at this point that my type of character tends to be a villain, or at the very least somewhat of an anti-hero. Relatedly, the relationships I get inspired by are invariably damaging, unhealthy, possessive, power-unbalanced or twisted – relationships that almost seem non-existent between fictional women. But I’ll come back to that later.)

It got me thinking. In my head I started playing around with character stereotypes. A hard-drinking emotionally blunt promiscuous violent man as James Bond, for example. What do you get when you take those characteristics and put them in a cis woman? The hardboiled noir detective, the knight in shining armour… Can those exist in female versions? While keeping the essence of their character, their personality intact?

I started to challenge my own views on gender, feminity, and masculinity. What do I associate with “woman” as an abstract concept? When I create OC’s as side characters, why do I choose to give them one gender and not another one? Why do I automatically give a character this or that trait just because of their gender?

There were a whole lot of ugly subconscious connections I laid bare like this, and I found it was pretty confrontational. It’s not fun, discovering how biased you really are.

So, the logical next step was to try my own hand at genderswapping. Pure hypothesis-testing, that: if it really were just the characters’ personality and interpersonal dynamics that attract me, that should work just as well if I swapped out one gender for another one, right? And I suppose it did. But it took some work.

Like Holyfant mentions in her excellent essay: it’s very easy to fall into stereotyping when writing women. You’d think that taking a male character’s personality as a starting point might be a solution to that, but it isn’t quite that easy. For example: what is unnerving and aggressive sexuality in a man can become, in a woman, that boring old cliché of the femme fatale – if you don’t pay attention, that is. This isn’t made easier by the fact that there aren’t many examples of fictional women like the ones I want to write. To create something on your own, without a blueprint to fall back on… It’s tricky.

Then there’s the fact that you can’t just transpose characteristics from men to women. Mind you, I’m not saying that women are fundamentally different than men or any shite like that. But the way society looks at women and men -  here there are radical differences. On the whole, society’s reaction to certain traits is vastly different depending on if it’s a man or a woman doing it, which also means that the character themselves is going to look differently at that. A physically strong, violent woman is considered an anomaly, a freak; a physically strong, violent man is an action hero. Or, the other way around: a gentle, caring man is considered weak, while a gentle, caring woman is an example of traditional womanhood. So if you write a woman who’s violent, you’re going to have to take into account that society as a whole tends to condemn that. And if a whole society condemns a character’s personality, that’s going to have an effect on the way a character sees herself, too. it really is a bit more complicated than just swapping around the pronouns and calling it a day.

It takes work, it takes practice. That much had become painfully obvious to me. If I reread my first attempts at genderswapping now, I cringe a little. Not that they’re bad, per se. It’s just that they’re not exactly original. There’s a giggling lipstick-wearing short-skirted seductress, there’s lean-but-not-muscular assassins for hire… It isn’t what I’d call groundbreaking – and even at the time, it wasn’t quite what I wanted either. I just didn’t know how to make what I wanted, at first. It took a pretty long while before I finally had my first genderswapped character that actually felt like a real, original, complex flesh-and-blood woman.

So. What I learned by genderswapping is 1) it’s bloody difficult to write a female version as nuanced and complex and original as the male original, 2) clichés are always lurking, ready to pounce, but 3) in the end it really is someone’s personality and relationship that makes me interested.

Those points can just as easily be applied to non-genderswapped female characters: for me, at least, women are harder to write interestingly than men, at first. It’s less practiced. But – the positive thing I’d learned – I really do have a type regardless of gender. Meaning that if I wanted to write more (non-genderswapped) femslash, I merely had to look for two or more fictional women with the same traits as the male characters I enjoyed, and then squish ‘em together.

Problem was… They didn’t really seem to exist?

Most relationships between fictional women, if they’re explicit, are shown to be soft! And gentle! And good and pure! Tara and Willow in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, for example – oh, there was a lot of fucked-upness going on there but the essence of their relationship was tenderness and open, honest love and mutual support. Which is great! But not what I want to write about. Even a pairing like Black Sails’ Max and Anne – both morally ambiguous, three-dimensional, and in Anne Bonny’s case stereotype-defying – are portrayed as essentially a gentle, healing, deeply caring relationship. Those unhealthy relationships I like to write about, the mutually destructive ones… They didn’t seem to show up in fiction.

Then I started watching Person of Interest.

Person of Interest has Root, a major villain-later-turned-hero. As far as female characters go, she’s sort of midway. She’s still flirty and seductive, and later openly emotional and caring – far more traditionally female than any of the male characters in the series. But she’s a hacker, she’s aggressive, she’s independent, and her plotlines give her agency. She’s original. She’s got an edge beyond the stereotype.

Person of Interest also has Shaw. And this is where things get very, very interesting.

Shaw is blunt. She’s unemotional. She’s aggressive, likes guns, likes violence. She avoids romantic relationships – not because of some painful deep trauma that gets healed in the end by the ‘right person’, just because that’s who she is. She’s sexual, but in a rather forthright, dominant, taking-what-she-wants-without-complications way you tend to only see in men. And right from the start, her interactions with Root are decidedly sexual. Their very first interaction is laced with BDSM-implications, and when they start interacting more – once Root has come over to the good side –, every exchange between them is full of barbs and barely-concealed aggression and power play. When Shaw at a later point describes a potential relationship between her and Root as a four alarm fire at an oil refinery, she isn’t lying. And when they finally end up having sex (it’s a dream, sort of, but shush) it looks more like a wrestling match than like “making love”, each one tearing at the other one and refusing to back down, not afraid to use punches or kicks in between the kisses. Miles away from the smiling-laughing-cuddling-vanilla sex Tara and Willow have.

It still doesn’t quite work for me, on the whole. Root, although Amy Acker does her damn best to give her life, still fits the traditional model too much for me to connect. She feels more like an idealised version of a woman than a real one. Especially in the later seasons her reactions are far more emotional, sentimental, than I’d really expect or want from her – again, traditionally feminine (in contrast to Shaw, who remains her gruff self). And of course Root and Shaw (spoiler alert) don’t really end up together. It’s very much implied that they would end up together, but then – in fine queer fictional woman tradition –  Root goes and dies before they can get there. It’s a shame, because flirting is one thing, but an actual relationship between those two would’ve been something I’d kill to see.

Still. Here was an example of the dynamic I like, but between two women. It does exist, it is possible. And seeing that gave me a starting point, a sort of blueprint to use for my own writing.

So. Where does that leave me, and my 2:1 ratio of M/M versus F/F fics?

The way I see it, there’s a dual responsibility. Part of the lack of interesting, flawed, complex,  ugly female characters in fiction has to do with the lack of material in canon – not just that there are very few female characters to start with, but also that this trend means fanfic writers have so few examples we can base our own work on. We still have to carve out our own model, here.

But another part is my own responsibility. Writing flawed women, unsympathetic women, women with ugly personalities or traits – that takes more work and effort. It doesn’t come quite naturally to me yet, which means it’s harder to write, which means I tend to avoid it in favour of easier things – which in turn, means there’s fewer ‘dark’ femslash in the word, and thus lesser examples to work from.

It’s a vicious self-perpetuating circle. But it’s starting to get its dents. In the form of Root and Shaw, of Gillian Anderson’s fingerlickingly complex Stella Gibson, in everything Sally Wainwright has written. And in our own work, of course. Story by story, we chip away at the block and create images and thoughts about the full complexity in relationships between women.

About the author

Pasiphile is a fanfiction author who mainly writes for Sherlock, but their work also includes Discworld, Attack on Titan, Luther and a heap of other fandoms. They have also co-edited two anthologies of original erotica under the name of Alex Freeman. You can find them on tumblr and AO3.