#meaner than blue. STILL not as mean as fanon blue though

[pantstomatch]

The Tuesday Chat on Wednesday

(1/17/18) 

Official second posting! Still not on Tuesday! Under the cut find: my thoughts and feelings about the wonder that is RPF, suspiciously incoherent ramblings about creating original characters, and then at the end there I talk a little about a few of my favorite fanfic authors.

Anonymous said:  hi!! This question might seem out of the blue but as one of my fave authors, I've always valued your opinion and I just want to hear your thoughts on RPF? TBH, I've always felt a bit... iffy about this but I just joined a fandom whose lead actors have an, IDK, "shippable" bromance?? But then, we do have Louis who finally spoke about the 'Larry' thing, and afjdlasf, I just feel a bit guilty reading RPF fics. :( Thoughts?

Oh, my friend, you have come to the right place! If you haven’t checked out my back catalog, you would not have known that I was in bandom for over 3 years and wrote around 80 fics about real live people.  I’ve been a rabid fangirl of Brendon Urie & Spencer Smith’s undying love. I’ve made Joe Trohman a hobo. I’ve written about Gabe Saporta being a demon. @lissadiane and I invented Mike Carden/Kevin Jonas (just in case anyone forgot that Skippy was a thing).  I’ve poked fun of the purity rings. I’ve put them all—all, EVERYONE—in space. Man, that was a time.

Anyway, here’s my take on it all:

a) they’re famous people. I’m not saying they’re totally fair game, but it’s not like you’re writing steamy hot sex about your neighbor, right? (although would they really know if you were?? I’m not going to judge.) 

b) you don’t shove it in their face (or you definitely shouldn’t). Sharing your thoughts with them about their fictional characters being in love is one thing (although honestly I don’t particularly go for that either), but this is an entirely different animal. That would be creepy and invasive. Some people like to lock their fics, but honestly I was in bandom during the livejournal craze, so other than making it so anons couldn’t comment, it was a little hard to gather an audience if it wasn’t open to the public. There was definitely an oh-shit please don’t google yourself (pete) vibe, but other than that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

c) you have to be able to distinguish the real person from the character you’re creating. You’re essentially writing a real life person into a fictional character. You can’t confuse the two. My fanon Brendon Urie was a bouncy little guy afraid of girls, in love with Spencer’s beard, and overly fond of jazz hands.  I’m pretty sure the real Brendon liked to jizz on girl’s faces.  So, you know, essentially completely different people. 

So conclusion: I’m super down with it. Some people aren’t, and that’s totally fine (but should leave off judging people who are).  So it really depends on how much you can look at that person as a character wholly separate from who they really are.

@slightestcomplication said:  Happy T/W chat! You talked a little about this in the writing meme, but I'd love to hear more about your process with regard to characters. Do they stay how you first envision them, or shift as you write? Mike, in Whatever, is such a great and authentic-feeling character - did you know how he would be from the start? 

Characters! Oh man, I love creating characters, it’s my favorite! So most of the time, they stay mainly how I envision them. Mike’s pretty much the same guy he was from the start. I wanted to create a kind of lovable asshole who thinks he’s cooler than he actually is. Basically a deep down decent guy with a lot of problematic quirks. He’s just not as foul-mouthed as I originally made him (apparently there is such a thing as too many ‘fucks’).  

For the most part, I know my characters before I know what the hell the story is going to be. This doesn’t always work out well—I have a bunch of characters in a folder just waiting for a story to resolve around them. On the other hand, I’m up for changing them if I absolutely need to.

I mentioned in last week’s chat that I had to rewrite my latest book 3 (4?) times.  My original editor, the one I had for Whatever, was able to tell me what was and wasn’t working while being great about it. She’s really good at making me see what I already knew, deep down: nothing was working and everything sucked. I couldn’t get the story OR the characters right, mainly because I had been working on it so long I didn’t want to. So she had me start over with a first person journal. I wrote until I could get the main character’s voice right in my head and THEN I started the story again. Same premise, better dude: all the angles changed. It was a totally different book.

So then what happens is that my editor goes on maternity leave, and I’m passed off to someone else. She’s super nice and helpful, but our editing is slow going. She wasn’t sure how I’d react criticism & major changes, and knows some authors hate getting their stuff edited too much—she was going soft on me. She openly admitted it in a phone call, in which essentially I was like: dude, rip me apart, I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing 90 percent of the time.  

We ended up cutting an entire chapter, an entire character, making another one meaner (she still might not be mean enough), and basically doing a bunch of stuff that a more possessive author might balk at. 

I’m attached to my guys, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes I gotta collect my guys in a little boxed room and give them snuggies and water bottles and let them wait it out while they try on various different hats.

From @drgrlfriend: favorite fanfic authors.

There are SO MANY, and this is just a very few amount, and I tend to hang on to older ones I’ve known for a couple fandoms:

@rageprufrock – her stuff is a delight. A delight. Most especially all the SGA stuff, like the mummy au and the one where they all watch an alien soap opera  or John gets pregnant or the one with the stitch and bitch.  Also: McDonald Hall fic. 

lilysaid – my favorite popslash writer, though she’s mostly closed up shop and you can find her stuff on the wayback machine.  Her fic beyond reproach is nostalgically my favorite fic of all time, and one of the only ones I’ve ever printed out for my bedside table.

@lissadiane – what is a favorite author list without my writing buddy? Some of you may know her from Harry Potter for breaking hearts with Beautiful World   (Cinnamon), or because she wrote a truly wonderful Kevin Jonas (little mermaid IN SPACE or the Robin Hood au)  (starflowers), or because she made Stiles see ghost animals and bleed magic and go to Hogwarts. Also PUNISHER AU. She’s just all around wonderful basically.

@mklutz – who wrote one of my favorite hockey RPFs  (hockey RPFs are my secret weakness), also wrote some of my favorite TW fics, and also also SGA, and a story about witches. 

harriet_vane – mostly because of the Forever, Now series, but also a little bit because of the Negotiation Limerick File. 

@astolat – The only author that could get me to read Transformers fic.  Probably.

I could go on, but I won’t, because it’s late and the dogs want to go to bed and cats are hovering ominously. Happy Wednesday everyone!