Non-Actionable Puffery

I hope all who celebrate had a pleasant Superb Owl Sunday!

Very late, but here’s Snowflake Challenge #4: Set your own goals!

A big goal for me this year is improving my writing process, making it more systematic and having stronger divisions between the brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and editing phases. I'm mainly focused on my professional writing - learning how to craft better legal briefs - but I expect that what I learn will impact my fanfic writing as well.

Relatedly, if anyone has recommendations for books or other resources you found really helpful when it comes to improving your writing - product or process - I’d appreciate hearing them! (I’ve read Bryan Garner’s The Winning Brief, Brand & White’s Legal Writing: The Strategy of Persuasion, and Ross Guberman’s Point Made.)

Today's challenge is to talk about my "fannish origin story." My first fandom was Star Wars, especially the old Expanded Universe novels. Like many people, I was writing fanfic before I knew there was a word for it, and certainly before I knew about online fanfic archives and fan communities! (I actually had a secret ambition of writing a Star Wars novel myself someday.)

Someone pointed me toward fanfiction.net before too long. I joined FFN in 2012, and when I checked the dates on my profiles I was shocked to see that I only joined AO3 in 2013 - in my memory the stretch of time when I was on FFN but didn't know about AO3 is longer, for some reason.

When I was first entering fandom, a lot of the people I looked up to were active in journal fandom, and I was honestly pretty intimidated. It took until 2018 for me to get up the nerve to join the cool kids on DW, and I'm very glad I did! The conversations I've had here have shaped my attitude toward writing and fandom in a really positive way - and, of course, I've made friends <3

Rec at least three fanworks you didn’t create.

First things first, I have to rec the absolutely mind-blowing novella CenozoicSynapsid wrote for me for Yuletide:

Ciel D'Oro (18766 words) by CenozoicSynapsid
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Il nome della rosa | The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Adso da Melk, Guglielmo da Baskerville | William of Baskerville
Additional Tags: Case Fic, Murder Mystery, Monks, Scholastic Philosophy, Polyphonic Music
Summary:
The second book of Adso of Melk, in which is described his journey to the city of Pavia, together with a description of the cathedral which is named San Piero Ciel D'Oro, and of the tombs of Augustine and Boethius and other famous men who are buried there. Containing also a narrative of a most infamous murder, and the investigations of this matter which were made by the learned friar William of Baskerville, employing methods of deduction. And in addition some discourses on music sung in one voice or in many voices, namely which of these is most fitting and proper for the celebration of the Holy Offices and the most solemn feast of the birthday of our Saviour.

This is one of the best works of fanfiction I have ever read. Heck, it's better than most published novels! The plot is so clever, and the author really captures the interplay of allusions that characterizes the source text. And the strength of the intellectual element doesn't come at the expense of the emotional element; there are moments that really tug at the heartstrings. I can't recommend this more highly!

Here are two fantastic Silm fics written in 2020, both Maedhros-centric:
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I posted a big bucket of Star Wars fic recs here for May the Fourth, but there are always more:
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Enjoy!

Who, from one of your fandoms, would you most want to have dinner with (or tea, or a random afternoon visit), and why?

I'm going to answer this twice, once for Tolkien and once for Star Wars.

My chosen guest from Middle-earth is Gandalf! With a life that long and well-traveled, he must know more interesting stories than just about anyone else - and he'd be a lot of fun to talk to as well. His indulgent attitude toward the Hobbits suggests he'd probably put up with my questions relatively well!

As for the Galaxy Far, Far Away, I'm going to go with a perhaps more unusual choice: Tionne Solusar. I frankly adore Tionne, and I'd love to hear her thoughts, both as a Jedi Master on what it's like to be a Jedi and as a Jedi historian on what "being a Jedi" means and has meant in different times and places.

Day 6: Create a list of at least three fannish things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a fannish wish-list of sorts.

1. Absolutely anything based on Maureen Ash's Templar Knight Mysteries book series (The Alehouse Murders, etc.). I have read them all, love them to pieces despite their shortcomings, and have yet to find a single fanwork of any sort for them. The Internet is a big place; surely there is another fan of this series out there!

2. Fics with Maedhros and Amlach! Amlach is so interesting, yet I have found only a few fics in which he features.

3. My stocking at fandom_stocking is here, with some general likes and dislikes, if you feel so moved.

Day 1: Talk about your Happy Place—the things that give you joy, calm you or keep you sane.
(Jumped in on Day 2, going back and doing this now.)

My first fannish Happy Place was the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I was an odd kid and frequently teased, but when an elementary school classmate gave me a copy of Showdown at Centerpoint it was my gateway into a world that made sense, that was clearly laid out and consistent, in a way that social interactions at school didn't and weren't. When my parents got divorced and so much in my life changed, Star Wars - specifically Star Wars novels - remained a constant. The local used bookstore had a couple of shelves of Star Wars novels in the sci-fi/fantasy section, and I would go every so often and buy another beat-up paperback that I would devour in an afternoon.

This particular Happy Place I valued because of its stability, but when the sequels were greenlit and the universe rebooted, so that the Expanded Universe I knew and loved became Legends, Star Wars couldn't be for me what it had been. It had been a safe place for me because of its constancy, but that was gone. That's not to say that I think the sequels are bad, or that the change was necessarily for the worse - but the very fact that Star Wars had changed meant I couldn't rely on it in the same way anymore.

However, what Star Wars had been to me, the Lord of the Rings became, and much more besides. I had read the Lord of the Rings as a kid, but hadn't fallen in love. In high school, though, when I read it again, I fell completely head over heels into Middle-earth. Today, the feel of the paper in my edition of the Lord of the Rings - a long-ago gift from my great-aunt to my mother, who doesn't really like fantasy, and then passed on to me -, the look of the typeface, the familiar cadence of Tolkien's prose, all give me that sense of stability that has been characteristic of my fannish interactions as long as I have been a fan. Although I do engage with other fandoms, that constancy, as today's prompt put it, both calms me and brings me joy.

Day 2: Rec at least three fanworks that you didn’t create.
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