#you would think that if someone had nine pages of gushing positive reviews

[chocolatepot]

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[dfcfanfics]

Howling Into The Wind About 2018

(Or: My first State of the MiraculElse Address. This is a text rant, not a story, so if you're not up for that you should not feel bad about pressing F to show respects and skipping it.)

I started writing fanfiction this past spring -- not just for the Miraculous universe, but period. It had been a very long time since the creative writing bug had bitten me, unless annoying people on message boards and Twitter counts. Long enough ago that the last time I'd dabbled in anything resembling that, it was on Usenet, back when Usenet was an actual communication medium and not just a transmission vector for spam and porn and binaries.

Those of you young enough to ask "What's Usenet?" are forgiven. Suffice it to say that I am olde. Old enough to be a grandfather to a few of you, and a Weird Uncle to most of the rest.

I am old, and writing fanfiction for what is at least nominally a kids' show. Yes, my wife gave me a bit of a funny look when I told her that, and yes, she should've. (She's watched some of Season 2 with me and enjoyed it; she thinks Marinette is unbearably cute and liked the humor in it. But I'm handling the obsession part for the two of us.)

Why? As my profile pages state, it's a love letter to this show and its creators. Even within the frustrating framework of 22-minute non-serial episodes with nearly no defined running order, flaky continuity and scheduling snafus, it's a marvelous show with a ton of heart at its core. The characters crack me up and remind me of some of my own teenaged battles with unrequited love, back in the dark ages. It should have stopped there, if I was a rational person.

But I read the leaked half-transcript to Troublemaker and thought, Hmmm, I bet I could take that somewhere interesting! I read a couple of flailing attempts at fanfic that someone posted on Reddit and thought, with egotistical glee, I could do better than THAT!

And so I did. I lashed together what became Summer Break, put it up on FFN, and figured that three people would say "that's nice" and it would disappear and I would go back to being a normal old fart.

But people seemed to like it! And that encouraged me to start writing a handful of "episodes," canon-respectful one-offs meant to mimic the status-quo, 22-minutes-and-we're-out format. They got nice feedback as well. "What if I did a multi-parter?" I thought, and I tried it. THAT got nice feedback, including people clamoring for more of it when I posted the last chapter. (And here I thought I'd already rambled on with it too long! Maybe... I was getting the knack of this?)

A discussion about a theme in that story inspired me to write The Marinette Project... and its fan reaction EXPLODED beyond my wildest dreams. I watched all the numbers go up on FFN and AO3 and couldn't believe my eyes. I still can't. (I remember showing my wife when it hit 5000 views on FFN and losing my mind over that. It's at eleven times that now, and ten thousand hits on AO3 (where hits are counted more rationally than FFN's system). Who ARE you people?)

Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright followed. I figured that this was going to be a short thought experiment, dabbling in non-canon with an AU Kwami personality and a generic villain and my usual piles of fluff and one-liners and references. But people _loved_ the Kwami I'd invented, the villain took on a distinct personality of her own, and before I knew it four chapters turned into nine and I had another hit on my hands.

My current project (Let's Take It From The Top) was probably overambitious from the start, and it's never found the same kind of audience as the last two. But it's been fun to write, and those who have read it have enjoyed it, and that's good enough for me.

"So what?" flits through the reader's mind at this point, either in the form of "I already knew all of that" or "Get to the point, you old fart."

The point is: Once you get past the reference to my Summer Break story above, NONE OF THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN. None of it was anticipated by me. I had no idea that I was going to turn the corner from "a guy who wrote a short story once" into A Writer.

You and people like you made that happen. The response to everything I have put out there (even the two crackfics!) has absolutely blown me away from the start. It's been overwhelmingly positive and every last word of it has been appreciated. I've read my PMs and comments and reviews and grinned from ear to ear. I've laughed out loud, I've gotten good ideas and interesting speculation, I've acquired some regulars, I've had many requests for sequels, I've had others recommending my stories, and my mind is absolutely BOGGLED. Boggled, I say. I shake my head and letter dice fly around and people make words from them.

(Those of you too young to know the "Boggle" word game are, of course, excused again.)

I was particularly astonished when something legitimately mindblowing happened twice -- other people made their own creative responses to something I had written.

@yunyin did me the considerable honor of sending me a pair of images, one a depiction of a scene from Let's Take It From The Top, the other a portrait of La Tigresse from Tyger, Tyger. My first fanart ever! My post gushing over them is still on my main page, so if you haven't seen them, scroll down and marvel at them. I'll wait.

Not long after, @brittsarts reached out to me and blew my mind when she asked permission to do a comic version of Tyger, Tyger. (As if I was going to say "please, no, DON'T pour your heart and soul into bringing my characters to life in a visual format!") She has been doing a wonderful job of interpreting my story and making it come alive, and that comic is the reason why 95% of the Tumblr followers I have found me in the first place.

So here I am. I am banging out the ending to Let's Take It slowly and steadily, concluding my longest story to date. I am debating which of several ideas will be the one I tackle next. I am checking my comments and PMs and reviews on FFN and AO3 more often than is healthy, because every time something pops up there it warms my heart. I am still wondering how I got to this point. And to all of you who've read my stories, enjoyed them, and encouraged me in all these ways and more to keep creating them:

Thank you so much.

And now, off to bed because I remain an old fart who needs his sleep.