Con report: Con.txt slash convention 2008
No offense intended against professional authors - I'm one myself, after all - but sometimes I'm on a forum for pro authors, and they're talking about submissions and contracts and marketing and sales figures and are saying things like, "Should I tell the tale from a different point of view? Would that make the story sell better?" and "Should I change this scene? Would that make the story sell better?" and "Should I use one-and-a-half-inch margins rather than one-inch margins? Would that make the story sell better?" and I just want to scream.
So here's to amateur fiction conventions, that oasis where the writing conversations center on whether the story was fun to write and fun to read.
INTRODUCTION FOR NEWBIES: WHAT IS A SLASH CONVENTION?
Slash is a form of fan fiction (and fan art and fan video, etc.) that features male/male or female/female attraction. Original (non-fan) fiction is also published in the slash community, called original slash. This report is about the discussions of fan fiction and original fiction (especially the latter) at the Con.txt slash convention in Silver Spring, Maryland, this past weekend, June 12-15 . . . with lots of meta commenting by me.
Feedback is welcome. My blog is open to anonymous comments if you don't have an InsaneJournal account.
CON ATMOSPHERE AND FANDOM TRENDS
Con.txt gives out rubber duckies to all its participants. This is typical of the convention's fun atmosphere. The con arrangers offer its participants a Friday-night disco, a wall on which to write their deepest thoughts ("I am so molestable"), a place where you can pick up snack food throughout the weekend, and various other goodies I mention below.
Judging from the number of references in the panels I attended, Torchwood is the hot fandom this year. Some of the older fandoms, such as Star Trek and Star Wars, continue to go strong. Race and gender were discussed a lot at the con; more about gender in the panels section below.
DEALERS' ROOM
"Dealers' rooms" are places at fiction/media conventions where items are offered for sale or display. I generally skip the ephemera (bookbags, etc.), and I didn't bother to browse through the vids and zines this year - I've had back luck finding zines that I want, because I'm generally interested in finding originalfic zines, litfic zines, or multi-fandom powerfic zines, and all of these categories seem to be rare. I also skipped the con's comic books library, though it looked interesting.
The swap table was overflowing with slashy and fannish items that folks wanted to pass on to others. I picked up a copy of the Ivory-Merchant film Maurice, plus a two-disc Empire Strikes Back soundtrack CD that was missing one disc.
Originalfic was amply represented this year with booths manned by Vincent Diamond and J. M. Snyder, two original slash authors whom I'd previously met online. "I wonder how they'll do?" a pro slash friend of mine asked later, and I echoed her sentiment, since the multi-author original slash table that I helped run at the last Con.txt con, two years ago, didn't pick up much traffic. (I see that J. M. Snyder seems pleased with how things went. Perhaps J. M.'s table was better organized than ours was.)
VID SHOW
A fanvid, in case you're not familiar with the art form, is a type of amateur music video. Fanvidders take clips from TV programs, movies, anime, or other related media and set them to music.
There weren't any vids at the show this year that pushed my biggest pleasure buttons. Destina's Brokeback Mountain vid elicited a lot of sighs and snifflings from the audience, but I suspect that this was largely due to her choice of music: Johnny Cash's "Hurt."
Here are my two recommendations:
VicBond 007: Accidentally in Love, by Counting Crows (Loveless fandom). A technically sophisticated manga/anime vid that made me long to marry still images with live-action film in one of my originalfic vids.
Shallott: Bohemian Like You, by The Dandy Warhols (Stargate Atlantis fandom). An amusing choice of music, and the rapid bits were striking.
What struck me most about the vids - and you're going to think I've been living under a rock for saying this - is how incredibly violent many of them were. I don't think this is reflective of the vidders; though fanvids do have a tradition of being heavily focussed on hurt/comfort (where one person is hurt physically or emotionally, and the person who loves them comforts them), they tend to dwell more on the comfort than the hurt. Instead, I think the vids' violence is reflective of the shows and films that the vids drew upon.
Afterwards I asked the friends I was attending the con with, "Was there any vid in the show that didn't feature a gun?" Though the answer was "Yes," my friends had to pause a moment to think. Some of the vids were just non-stop violence - always for a themantic/emotional purpose, but still, when a violent vid can make a torturefic writer (me) squeamish, you know that there's something seriously wrong with our culture.
On the other hand, I am happy to say that I didn't notice any gratuitous eroticism in the vids. (Well, except for the Queer As Folk vid - but QAF vids are nearly always gratuitously erotic, because the show is.) Partly this is due to lack of erotic source material, but still, it would have been quite easy for, say, the Buffy vid to have shown nothing but bouncing breasts. Slash vids, like slash stories, tend to focus strongly on plotline and character and theme, with any romantic/erotic scenes inserted in order to further those goals. I'm told that there are pure PWP (Plot? What Plot?) slash stories out there, but all of the stories I've seen labelled PWP are simply stories where the plot is focussed on sex, with full development of character and theme.
Since I don't often rec fanvids, I might as well mention here that when I went searching online for the above vids, I stumbled across a really nice vid for a slash fan fiction story (made by a reader of the story):
Sue: Bleak Aspect. Here's the vid's introduction. Here's the fan fiction by Clara Swift, which I haven't read yet - go all the way to the last of the pages for this tag in order to start at the beginning, because the posts are in reverse chronological order. (See also the related posts.)
PANELS
In addition to the panels I list below, I attended the following panels: Star Wars: Why Do We Love It and Where is It Going? | Vorkosigan: Good Things Come in Small Packages | The Art of the AU, or why we like to take our guys and make them in ballerinas, baristas, or aeronauts . . . | When You Get What You Want (i.e. when slash becomes canonical).
On to my panel descriptions and general musings on topics addressed by the panels.
*** Doctor Who: What's a Slasher to Do with Old School Who? Quite a Lot!
A witty and well-done presentation describing the first eight Doctors, with commentary, still images, and clips. I've been watching Doctor Who since I discovered the show in England at age fourteen (I own sixty-one novelizations from the 1960s and 1970s, inherited from my younger brother), but I still learned a lot from this panel.
*** Being Fannish Without a Fandom.
"My fandom is originalfic," I announced at the panel, which made one of the moderators laugh, but I was honestly interested in what the differences are between how individual fandoms work and how the originalfic community works.
It turns out we have a lot of what the fandoms have: recommendations (though not enough), meta (though not enough), a newsletter (now sadly defunct), and forums. Some things we obviously can't have, such as fanon. (You can't have fanon without a canon.)
But what struck me throughout the weekend, while listening to fanficcers talk, is that we originalfic folk don't have hot stories and hot trends. We don't have people saying, "Oh my god, have you read the latest installment of that story everyone is reading?" Nor do we have the originalfic equivalent of someone saying, "I've just read a whole bunch of stories about Obi-Wan visiting a planet where virgins like him are forced to have sex for ritual purposes, and I can't wait to write one of those stories too."
I find this odd. It's not as though we don't have originalfic writers that everyone is reccing on their Websites (*cough* Manna *cough*). And it's not as though imitation doesn't occur amongst originalfic authors. So why is all of this so much below the radar? Why aren't originalfic writers getting together on forums and squeeing over certain new stories or certain trends? Sometimes, reading originalfic comms - where nothing is happening except for individuals announcing stories, with maybe one or two responses - I understand why so few slashers write originalfic. There just doesn't seem to be the same sense of community and sharing among originalfic writers as there is in many fandoms.
It's not as though there couldn't be. Quite often the originalfic writers who will post an announcement of their story and then wander away (I count myself among such writers) are the same ones who will then go over to a Harry Potter comm and squee endlessly about the latest HP trends and the latest HP hot stories.
I was trying to puzzle out the reasons for this difference with my pro slash friend. She thought it was because originalfic writers are more protective of their stories than fanfic writers are - they don't like being imitated. This may be true of many pro slash writers (though it ain't true of me), but I'm not sure it's true of most amateur original slash writers.
I think the more likely reason is that there's no common canon. People squee over the hot trends in Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan stories, not just because they like the stories, but because they like seeing Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan in certain situations. The few occasions when I've seen meta build up around originalfic (*cough* Manna *cough*), it was because the characters were so well drawn that lots and lots of people wanted to talk about those particular characters. It was the same sort of trend that causes litfic to arise around particular professional novels.
Still, it seems to me that original slash subgenres ought to inspire hot-story and hot-trend discussions. Back when I came into slashdom in 2002, one of the few places where there was a sizeable number of originalfic writers was in the darkfic community. There was a fair amount of hot-story and hot-trend discussions going on at that time among darkficcers, whether they wrote original fiction or fan fiction. Likewise, I would expect that writers of a particular slash subgenre - slavefic, as an example - would have so much in common in terms of subject matter that this would overcome the problem that they were writing in different fandoms and with different original characters. Thus you ought to be able to get a situation where everyone who was interested in a particular subgenre was saying, "Oh my god, have you read the latest installment of that slave story everyone is reading?" or "I've just read a whole bunch of stories about a slave visiting a planet where virgins like him are forced to have sex for ritual purposes, and I can't wait to write one of those stories too."
I'd like to see more of this sort of thing happening, because all authors stand on the shoulders of giants, or even of the two billion dwarves that came before us.
An example: In 2002, I read Mystique's Phantom Menace story The Best of the Bargain. It was fairly often recced at the time. When I read it, I'd already inserted black humor into my own stories, but after I read it, I almost immediately wrote two black-humor, first-person, shady-but-sympathetic-protagonist-oblivi
But here's the important point: If I'd been dwelling in a literary culture that valued complete originality (which is what most of the literary world outside of fan fiction does), I think I would have felt inhibited from writing those two stories. I think I would have said to myself, "Oh, no, I mustn't be imitative." Instead, I was in the slash world, where imitation is perceived as good. That's why it seems to important to me that originalfic writers in the fan fiction community develop their own tradition of borrowing ideas from each other's stories. All of us who have dwelt in the fan fiction community for any length of time know the difference between plagiarism and paying homage to another writer's story.
*** Going Pro: What Does It Take to Make Slash Canon?
This panel was about how to sell your original slash story to a publisher. I have to confess that, while I'm delighted by the integration of originalfic into slashdom that pro slash panels represent, I wasn't comfortable with the format of this panel.
This is the second pro slash panel I've attended; the first one was at the last Con.txt convention. In both cases, what we got was a bunch of editors / agents / published authors sitting at the front of the room, telling audience members how to sell their stories, and taking questions.
By contrast to this, at the first two original slash panels I ever attended (at Connexions in 2003 and 2004; I was one of the organizers of the 2003 panel), we all sat in a circle and discussed how to break through the professional glass ceiling. Sitting in a circle, with everyone discussing topics together, is how most slash "panels" are conducted. That's why I like slash cons better than pro fiction cons - because the moderators usually aren't the only ones offering answers.
While I'm delighted that matters have reached the point where the professional glass ceiling has been breached by a considerable number of original slashers, I miss the egalitarian format of the earlier original slash panels. It's not as though there were no pro writers at the 2003 and 2004 "sit in the circle" panels, and it's not as though there were no pro writers sitting in the audience at the 2006 and 2008 "listen to the experts" panels. Indeed, even the experiences of amateur writers would have contributed to the conversation - amateur writers have a lot to teach pro writers.
Now that the professional glass ceiling has been broken (although still not to the extent that it should be), I'd like to see some original slash panels in the future that focus specifically on amateur issues. I hate to say it, but it feels to me as though so many good original slash writers are being sucked into professional circles that slashdom is losing many of its best originalfic writers.
This isn't to say that turning pro always cuts slashers off from the slash community. Some slashers-turned-pro - whom I utterly love for this - continue to make their original stories available free online, either while their books are in print or after the story rights revert back to them. In cases where their evil publishers won't allow them to ever post their original works online, the authors may continue to write fan fiction. As a result, they remain active writers within the slash community, rather than wandering off entirely to the pro world.
Even so, I think we need to take care to be nurturing of original slash authors who are simply not interested in professionally marketing their works, yet who may have talent, or potential talent, that equals that of the best pro slashers. If we don't do this, then the amateur original slash community is likely to become a wasteland of bad writers.
That said, I found this year's pro slash panel moderately interesting.
One of the panelists had serialized a historical slash novel on her blog. The historical slash story in question was inspired by an out-of-copyright text. A literary agent who liked fanfic was complaining to a fanfic friend that none of the stories on her slush pile was as good as the fan fiction she read online. The friend said, "You should read this story," and pointed her to the historical slash novel. The fairy-tale ending: the novel was sold to a major publishing house. (My warning: Don't try this at home. Though it isn't the first time something like this has happened in fandom, it's a very, very unlikely scenario for getting published.)
Another author on the panel said that she had been receiving an annual income in three figures when she self-published; now that she works with small e-publishers, her annual income is in four figures. She added, however, that she retains print rights over her e-books because she still likes to self-publish.
*** Age of Sail: Pirates, Pinnaces, and Planks.
One of the moderators of this historical slash panel distinguished between handwavy stories ("It doesn't matter whether it's sixteenth-century ships or eighteenth-century ships - and I'll include tentacles!") and historically accurate stories ("No, I can't write that, because on this day of October 17, 1794 . . ."). Everyone who spoke agreed that both types of stories can work well, and that certain types of fandoms encourage certain types of stories. However, folks cautioned that one should avoid the implausible in handwavy stories (e.g., ships with fireplaces and marble tubs), and one should avoid infodumps in historically accurate stories.
I brought up the topic of historical fantasy, whereupon someone said, "I hate historical fantasy, because writers change one detail in our world, and they don't think about how lots of other details in our world would change also." I winced, because that's something I worry about in my own historical fantasy stories. I get praised occasionally for my worldbuilding, but this must be due to my ability to evoke the world I've built, because I sure don't have the needed skills to create a sociologically accurate world (though I'm fortunate enough to have friends and beta readers who do have such skills). Still, I think that my setting the stories in a secondary world minimizes the damage. I can say, "This is a parallel universe where everything is the same except this" - and just hope that some knowledgeable reader won't say, "But you couldn't possibly have tea being served in your society if you alter this."
Another topic discussed in the panel was whether to include highly taboo words in your story (such as the N word) if those words were used in historical times. Several folks said that, while they didn't want to fall into political correctness, they felt that such words didn't have the same impact on modern readers that the words had on people during the periods of the stories. If you said the N word in the eighteenth century, it wouldn't utterly jolt listeners the way it would if it appeared in a story today. One person said that, as an alternative, she uses historically accurate words that carry a taint of offensiveness to them, but aren't likely to jolt the reader out of the story. I think what she had in mind was something like "pansy" instead of "faggot."
*** Writing Longer Stories
"You should go to this panel so that you can tell the rest of us how to do this," said my pro slash friend, who can't seem to break the novella barrier. I didn't get a chance to speak, but afterwards I gave her my suggestion: If you look at the novels of some authors - Diana Gabaldon's Outlander novels, for example - you'll see that what the author is actually writing is a series of interconnected novellas. So if the idea of writing a novel makes you turn pale, think of a novel as a series of interconnected short fiction works that progressively rise toward the highest climax. In other words, write a short fiction work, then write its sequels, just making sure that all of the stories build up to a final crisis.
*** The Personal Politics of Slash
Me (immediately after the con): "Yes, rain is coming. It's showing on the radar stuff-y."
Doug: "Stuff-y? Did you say 'stuff-y'?"
Me: "I've just spent four days in a hotel with a bunch of girls. My language is going to reflect that for the next few days."
One of the questions that this panel asked was: "To what extent is slashdom a female space?" I'm afraid that the term "female space" irritates the heck out of me because it implies that the slash community is a place for females, and anyone else is there on their sufferance. On the other hand, I think it's fair to say that slash is very much a female culture. And as one guy at the panel put it, "We like that." Slashers, whether female or male, like stories that have been shaped by typically feminine preferences in reading matter.
Slash is also a female culture inasmuch as the mode of communication between the participants tends to be typically feminine. I never saw a non-effeminate guy squee till I came into slashdom. (A typical "squee" is, "OMG, Captain Jack is so cute in that scene! (*hearts*).") For that matter, I never saw a butch lesbian squee till I came into slashdom. Masculine folks, both male and female, tend to adopt feminine language and responses when they're in slash circles.
I find this refreshing. I get the same warm-and-cuddly feeling at slash conventions that I do in ultra-masculine leather bars: a feeling that something valuable (female culture / male culture) is being preserved in our increasingly gender-neutral world.
I have nothing against gender neutrality. I'm gender-neutral myself. But I think there needs to be places where female culture and male culture can run rampant - preferably places where both sexes are welcome, so that they can learn about cultures they may not have grown up in.
What was notable about this panel was how civilized the discussions were of controversial topics. ("Is reading and writing slash transgressive? Feminist? Misogynist? Racist? Left- or right-wing?") Nobody raised their voices. My friends told me afterwards that it was the same in the other hot-button panels they attended - that the dialogue was fruitful and didn't degenerate into the real-life equivalent of flame wars.
*** Organization for Transformative Works: Archives, Academia, and All This Publicity
This is the sort of panel where the "experts at the front of the room" format works. The experts in question - the staff of the newly formed OTW - were mainly interested in addressing complaints about the organization. Everyone, staff and critics alike, were polite to each other.
Among other things, the staff said that originalfic would be welcome in their upcoming archives "if it was fannish." I talked to the moderator afterwards, who confirmed that "a fan writing for other fans" qualified as "fannish." [Edit: See the follow-up comment clarifying this conversation.]
*** But If, Baby, I'm the Bottom, You're the Top
"You have not lived," I told my apprentice the next day, "until you have attended a BDSM fiction panel where a quarter of the audience members are knitting."
OVERHEARD AT THE CON
While checking her text messages on the day before the convention: "It's really nice that she sent me porn, but I wish she'd send me her arrival time."
On whether the Wookies watch human porn: "The Wookies have cons called fleshies."
"The whole purpose of Star Wars was to have a movie for twelve-year-olds." "So we need to have a remake of Star Wars for adults."
"We all know that Yoda was doing it with Chewbacca." "Oh, god, my eyes!"
"Oh, podrace - time to go to the bathroom."
Moderator, at the beginning of the panel discussion: "On that note, let's begin with squee."
In response to the comment that historical slash writers should remember that, when they walk into a room of their own house, they don't take much notice of the laundry machine there, so they shouldn't have their historical characters taking much notice of what is obvious to them: "Yes, but it's helpful for the author to know the correct terminology for obvious objects, so that they don't have the character thinking, 'There's that metal box with a door.'"
Quoting a fellow reader with a tad bit less knowledge of history than she should have: "Oh my god, I'm so offended - do you realize that sailors in the eighteenth century were misogynists?"
"I think there's a progression from vanilla porn to 'Fuck me gently with a chainsaw.'"
"If you're going to write 130,000 words of UST [unresolved sexual tension], that better be damn good sex."
"You have to draw a line [between what you write about and how you live your life]. This is me writing [a violent story], and this is me going to the grocery store and not knifing the idiot in the check-out line."
During a discussion of gender-transformation stories: "I was having a problem with my story: You can't have boy/boy sex when one of them is already a girl."
"When I'm having a really bad bout of self-editing, I switch the font to Wingdings."
"What are your squicks?" "I draw the line at men and women together."
"We do not want to fight a test case [on the legality of fan fiction]. We have better things to do--" "Writing porn."
One the current lack of variety in media coverage of fandom: "When Congress wants to know how fandom works, it calls Henry Jenkins."
On how fandom is not a single entity: "We are not the Borg."
Other people's impressions of the con.
So here's to amateur fiction conventions, that oasis where the writing conversations center on whether the story was fun to write and fun to read.
INTRODUCTION FOR NEWBIES: WHAT IS A SLASH CONVENTION?
Slash is a form of fan fiction (and fan art and fan video, etc.) that features male/male or female/female attraction. Original (non-fan) fiction is also published in the slash community, called original slash. This report is about the discussions of fan fiction and original fiction (especially the latter) at the Con.txt slash convention in Silver Spring, Maryland, this past weekend, June 12-15 . . . with lots of meta commenting by me.
Feedback is welcome. My blog is open to anonymous comments if you don't have an InsaneJournal account.
CON ATMOSPHERE AND FANDOM TRENDS
Con.txt gives out rubber duckies to all its participants. This is typical of the convention's fun atmosphere. The con arrangers offer its participants a Friday-night disco, a wall on which to write their deepest thoughts ("I am so molestable"), a place where you can pick up snack food throughout the weekend, and various other goodies I mention below.
Judging from the number of references in the panels I attended, Torchwood is the hot fandom this year. Some of the older fandoms, such as Star Trek and Star Wars, continue to go strong. Race and gender were discussed a lot at the con; more about gender in the panels section below.
DEALERS' ROOM
"Dealers' rooms" are places at fiction/media conventions where items are offered for sale or display. I generally skip the ephemera (bookbags, etc.), and I didn't bother to browse through the vids and zines this year - I've had back luck finding zines that I want, because I'm generally interested in finding originalfic zines, litfic zines, or multi-fandom powerfic zines, and all of these categories seem to be rare. I also skipped the con's comic books library, though it looked interesting.
The swap table was overflowing with slashy and fannish items that folks wanted to pass on to others. I picked up a copy of the Ivory-Merchant film Maurice, plus a two-disc Empire Strikes Back soundtrack CD that was missing one disc.
Originalfic was amply represented this year with booths manned by Vincent Diamond and J. M. Snyder, two original slash authors whom I'd previously met online. "I wonder how they'll do?" a pro slash friend of mine asked later, and I echoed her sentiment, since the multi-author original slash table that I helped run at the last Con.txt con, two years ago, didn't pick up much traffic. (I see that J. M. Snyder seems pleased with how things went. Perhaps J. M.'s table was better organized than ours was.)
VID SHOW
A fanvid, in case you're not familiar with the art form, is a type of amateur music video. Fanvidders take clips from TV programs, movies, anime, or other related media and set them to music.
There weren't any vids at the show this year that pushed my biggest pleasure buttons. Destina's Brokeback Mountain vid elicited a lot of sighs and snifflings from the audience, but I suspect that this was largely due to her choice of music: Johnny Cash's "Hurt."
Here are my two recommendations:
VicBond 007: Accidentally in Love, by Counting Crows (Loveless fandom). A technically sophisticated manga/anime vid that made me long to marry still images with live-action film in one of my originalfic vids.
Shallott: Bohemian Like You, by The Dandy Warhols (Stargate Atlantis fandom). An amusing choice of music, and the rapid bits were striking.
What struck me most about the vids - and you're going to think I've been living under a rock for saying this - is how incredibly violent many of them were. I don't think this is reflective of the vidders; though fanvids do have a tradition of being heavily focussed on hurt/comfort (where one person is hurt physically or emotionally, and the person who loves them comforts them), they tend to dwell more on the comfort than the hurt. Instead, I think the vids' violence is reflective of the shows and films that the vids drew upon.
Afterwards I asked the friends I was attending the con with, "Was there any vid in the show that didn't feature a gun?" Though the answer was "Yes," my friends had to pause a moment to think. Some of the vids were just non-stop violence - always for a themantic/emotional purpose, but still, when a violent vid can make a torturefic writer (me) squeamish, you know that there's something seriously wrong with our culture.
On the other hand, I am happy to say that I didn't notice any gratuitous eroticism in the vids. (Well, except for the Queer As Folk vid - but QAF vids are nearly always gratuitously erotic, because the show is.) Partly this is due to lack of erotic source material, but still, it would have been quite easy for, say, the Buffy vid to have shown nothing but bouncing breasts. Slash vids, like slash stories, tend to focus strongly on plotline and character and theme, with any romantic/erotic scenes inserted in order to further those goals. I'm told that there are pure PWP (Plot? What Plot?) slash stories out there, but all of the stories I've seen labelled PWP are simply stories where the plot is focussed on sex, with full development of character and theme.
Since I don't often rec fanvids, I might as well mention here that when I went searching online for the above vids, I stumbled across a really nice vid for a slash fan fiction story (made by a reader of the story):
Sue: Bleak Aspect. Here's the vid's introduction. Here's the fan fiction by Clara Swift, which I haven't read yet - go all the way to the last of the pages for this tag in order to start at the beginning, because the posts are in reverse chronological order. (See also the related posts.)
PANELS
In addition to the panels I list below, I attended the following panels: Star Wars: Why Do We Love It and Where is It Going? | Vorkosigan: Good Things Come in Small Packages | The Art of the AU, or why we like to take our guys and make them in ballerinas, baristas, or aeronauts . . . | When You Get What You Want (i.e. when slash becomes canonical).
On to my panel descriptions and general musings on topics addressed by the panels.
*** Doctor Who: What's a Slasher to Do with Old School Who? Quite a Lot!
A witty and well-done presentation describing the first eight Doctors, with commentary, still images, and clips. I've been watching Doctor Who since I discovered the show in England at age fourteen (I own sixty-one novelizations from the 1960s and 1970s, inherited from my younger brother), but I still learned a lot from this panel.
*** Being Fannish Without a Fandom.
"My fandom is originalfic," I announced at the panel, which made one of the moderators laugh, but I was honestly interested in what the differences are between how individual fandoms work and how the originalfic community works.
It turns out we have a lot of what the fandoms have: recommendations (though not enough), meta (though not enough), a newsletter (now sadly defunct), and forums. Some things we obviously can't have, such as fanon. (You can't have fanon without a canon.)
But what struck me throughout the weekend, while listening to fanficcers talk, is that we originalfic folk don't have hot stories and hot trends. We don't have people saying, "Oh my god, have you read the latest installment of that story everyone is reading?" Nor do we have the originalfic equivalent of someone saying, "I've just read a whole bunch of stories about Obi-Wan visiting a planet where virgins like him are forced to have sex for ritual purposes, and I can't wait to write one of those stories too."
I find this odd. It's not as though we don't have originalfic writers that everyone is reccing on their Websites (*cough* Manna *cough*). And it's not as though imitation doesn't occur amongst originalfic authors. So why is all of this so much below the radar? Why aren't originalfic writers getting together on forums and squeeing over certain new stories or certain trends? Sometimes, reading originalfic comms - where nothing is happening except for individuals announcing stories, with maybe one or two responses - I understand why so few slashers write originalfic. There just doesn't seem to be the same sense of community and sharing among originalfic writers as there is in many fandoms.
It's not as though there couldn't be. Quite often the originalfic writers who will post an announcement of their story and then wander away (I count myself among such writers) are the same ones who will then go over to a Harry Potter comm and squee endlessly about the latest HP trends and the latest HP hot stories.
I was trying to puzzle out the reasons for this difference with my pro slash friend. She thought it was because originalfic writers are more protective of their stories than fanfic writers are - they don't like being imitated. This may be true of many pro slash writers (though it ain't true of me), but I'm not sure it's true of most amateur original slash writers.
I think the more likely reason is that there's no common canon. People squee over the hot trends in Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan stories, not just because they like the stories, but because they like seeing Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan in certain situations. The few occasions when I've seen meta build up around originalfic (*cough* Manna *cough*), it was because the characters were so well drawn that lots and lots of people wanted to talk about those particular characters. It was the same sort of trend that causes litfic to arise around particular professional novels.
Still, it seems to me that original slash subgenres ought to inspire hot-story and hot-trend discussions. Back when I came into slashdom in 2002, one of the few places where there was a sizeable number of originalfic writers was in the darkfic community. There was a fair amount of hot-story and hot-trend discussions going on at that time among darkficcers, whether they wrote original fiction or fan fiction. Likewise, I would expect that writers of a particular slash subgenre - slavefic, as an example - would have so much in common in terms of subject matter that this would overcome the problem that they were writing in different fandoms and with different original characters. Thus you ought to be able to get a situation where everyone who was interested in a particular subgenre was saying, "Oh my god, have you read the latest installment of that slave story everyone is reading?" or "I've just read a whole bunch of stories about a slave visiting a planet where virgins like him are forced to have sex for ritual purposes, and I can't wait to write one of those stories too."
I'd like to see more of this sort of thing happening, because all authors stand on the shoulders of giants, or even of the two billion dwarves that came before us.
An example: In 2002, I read Mystique's Phantom Menace story The Best of the Bargain. It was fairly often recced at the time. When I read it, I'd already inserted black humor into my own stories, but after I read it, I almost immediately wrote two black-humor, first-person, shady-but-sympathetic-protagonist-oblivi
But here's the important point: If I'd been dwelling in a literary culture that valued complete originality (which is what most of the literary world outside of fan fiction does), I think I would have felt inhibited from writing those two stories. I think I would have said to myself, "Oh, no, I mustn't be imitative." Instead, I was in the slash world, where imitation is perceived as good. That's why it seems to important to me that originalfic writers in the fan fiction community develop their own tradition of borrowing ideas from each other's stories. All of us who have dwelt in the fan fiction community for any length of time know the difference between plagiarism and paying homage to another writer's story.
*** Going Pro: What Does It Take to Make Slash Canon?
This panel was about how to sell your original slash story to a publisher. I have to confess that, while I'm delighted by the integration of originalfic into slashdom that pro slash panels represent, I wasn't comfortable with the format of this panel.
This is the second pro slash panel I've attended; the first one was at the last Con.txt convention. In both cases, what we got was a bunch of editors / agents / published authors sitting at the front of the room, telling audience members how to sell their stories, and taking questions.
By contrast to this, at the first two original slash panels I ever attended (at Connexions in 2003 and 2004; I was one of the organizers of the 2003 panel), we all sat in a circle and discussed how to break through the professional glass ceiling. Sitting in a circle, with everyone discussing topics together, is how most slash "panels" are conducted. That's why I like slash cons better than pro fiction cons - because the moderators usually aren't the only ones offering answers.
While I'm delighted that matters have reached the point where the professional glass ceiling has been breached by a considerable number of original slashers, I miss the egalitarian format of the earlier original slash panels. It's not as though there were no pro writers at the 2003 and 2004 "sit in the circle" panels, and it's not as though there were no pro writers sitting in the audience at the 2006 and 2008 "listen to the experts" panels. Indeed, even the experiences of amateur writers would have contributed to the conversation - amateur writers have a lot to teach pro writers.
Now that the professional glass ceiling has been broken (although still not to the extent that it should be), I'd like to see some original slash panels in the future that focus specifically on amateur issues. I hate to say it, but it feels to me as though so many good original slash writers are being sucked into professional circles that slashdom is losing many of its best originalfic writers.
This isn't to say that turning pro always cuts slashers off from the slash community. Some slashers-turned-pro - whom I utterly love for this - continue to make their original stories available free online, either while their books are in print or after the story rights revert back to them. In cases where their evil publishers won't allow them to ever post their original works online, the authors may continue to write fan fiction. As a result, they remain active writers within the slash community, rather than wandering off entirely to the pro world.
Even so, I think we need to take care to be nurturing of original slash authors who are simply not interested in professionally marketing their works, yet who may have talent, or potential talent, that equals that of the best pro slashers. If we don't do this, then the amateur original slash community is likely to become a wasteland of bad writers.
That said, I found this year's pro slash panel moderately interesting.
One of the panelists had serialized a historical slash novel on her blog. The historical slash story in question was inspired by an out-of-copyright text. A literary agent who liked fanfic was complaining to a fanfic friend that none of the stories on her slush pile was as good as the fan fiction she read online. The friend said, "You should read this story," and pointed her to the historical slash novel. The fairy-tale ending: the novel was sold to a major publishing house. (My warning: Don't try this at home. Though it isn't the first time something like this has happened in fandom, it's a very, very unlikely scenario for getting published.)
Another author on the panel said that she had been receiving an annual income in three figures when she self-published; now that she works with small e-publishers, her annual income is in four figures. She added, however, that she retains print rights over her e-books because she still likes to self-publish.
*** Age of Sail: Pirates, Pinnaces, and Planks.
One of the moderators of this historical slash panel distinguished between handwavy stories ("It doesn't matter whether it's sixteenth-century ships or eighteenth-century ships - and I'll include tentacles!") and historically accurate stories ("No, I can't write that, because on this day of October 17, 1794 . . ."). Everyone who spoke agreed that both types of stories can work well, and that certain types of fandoms encourage certain types of stories. However, folks cautioned that one should avoid the implausible in handwavy stories (e.g., ships with fireplaces and marble tubs), and one should avoid infodumps in historically accurate stories.
I brought up the topic of historical fantasy, whereupon someone said, "I hate historical fantasy, because writers change one detail in our world, and they don't think about how lots of other details in our world would change also." I winced, because that's something I worry about in my own historical fantasy stories. I get praised occasionally for my worldbuilding, but this must be due to my ability to evoke the world I've built, because I sure don't have the needed skills to create a sociologically accurate world (though I'm fortunate enough to have friends and beta readers who do have such skills). Still, I think that my setting the stories in a secondary world minimizes the damage. I can say, "This is a parallel universe where everything is the same except this" - and just hope that some knowledgeable reader won't say, "But you couldn't possibly have tea being served in your society if you alter this."
Another topic discussed in the panel was whether to include highly taboo words in your story (such as the N word) if those words were used in historical times. Several folks said that, while they didn't want to fall into political correctness, they felt that such words didn't have the same impact on modern readers that the words had on people during the periods of the stories. If you said the N word in the eighteenth century, it wouldn't utterly jolt listeners the way it would if it appeared in a story today. One person said that, as an alternative, she uses historically accurate words that carry a taint of offensiveness to them, but aren't likely to jolt the reader out of the story. I think what she had in mind was something like "pansy" instead of "faggot."
*** Writing Longer Stories
"You should go to this panel so that you can tell the rest of us how to do this," said my pro slash friend, who can't seem to break the novella barrier. I didn't get a chance to speak, but afterwards I gave her my suggestion: If you look at the novels of some authors - Diana Gabaldon's Outlander novels, for example - you'll see that what the author is actually writing is a series of interconnected novellas. So if the idea of writing a novel makes you turn pale, think of a novel as a series of interconnected short fiction works that progressively rise toward the highest climax. In other words, write a short fiction work, then write its sequels, just making sure that all of the stories build up to a final crisis.
*** The Personal Politics of Slash
Me (immediately after the con): "Yes, rain is coming. It's showing on the radar stuff-y."
Doug: "Stuff-y? Did you say 'stuff-y'?"
Me: "I've just spent four days in a hotel with a bunch of girls. My language is going to reflect that for the next few days."
One of the questions that this panel asked was: "To what extent is slashdom a female space?" I'm afraid that the term "female space" irritates the heck out of me because it implies that the slash community is a place for females, and anyone else is there on their sufferance. On the other hand, I think it's fair to say that slash is very much a female culture. And as one guy at the panel put it, "We like that." Slashers, whether female or male, like stories that have been shaped by typically feminine preferences in reading matter.
Slash is also a female culture inasmuch as the mode of communication between the participants tends to be typically feminine. I never saw a non-effeminate guy squee till I came into slashdom. (A typical "squee" is, "OMG, Captain Jack is so cute in that scene! (*hearts*).") For that matter, I never saw a butch lesbian squee till I came into slashdom. Masculine folks, both male and female, tend to adopt feminine language and responses when they're in slash circles.
I find this refreshing. I get the same warm-and-cuddly feeling at slash conventions that I do in ultra-masculine leather bars: a feeling that something valuable (female culture / male culture) is being preserved in our increasingly gender-neutral world.
I have nothing against gender neutrality. I'm gender-neutral myself. But I think there needs to be places where female culture and male culture can run rampant - preferably places where both sexes are welcome, so that they can learn about cultures they may not have grown up in.
What was notable about this panel was how civilized the discussions were of controversial topics. ("Is reading and writing slash transgressive? Feminist? Misogynist? Racist? Left- or right-wing?") Nobody raised their voices. My friends told me afterwards that it was the same in the other hot-button panels they attended - that the dialogue was fruitful and didn't degenerate into the real-life equivalent of flame wars.
*** Organization for Transformative Works: Archives, Academia, and All This Publicity
This is the sort of panel where the "experts at the front of the room" format works. The experts in question - the staff of the newly formed OTW - were mainly interested in addressing complaints about the organization. Everyone, staff and critics alike, were polite to each other.
Among other things, the staff said that originalfic would be welcome in their upcoming archives "if it was fannish." I talked to the moderator afterwards, who confirmed that "a fan writing for other fans" qualified as "fannish." [Edit: See the follow-up comment clarifying this conversation.]
*** But If, Baby, I'm the Bottom, You're the Top
"You have not lived," I told my apprentice the next day, "until you have attended a BDSM fiction panel where a quarter of the audience members are knitting."
OVERHEARD AT THE CON
While checking her text messages on the day before the convention: "It's really nice that she sent me porn, but I wish she'd send me her arrival time."
On whether the Wookies watch human porn: "The Wookies have cons called fleshies."
"The whole purpose of Star Wars was to have a movie for twelve-year-olds." "So we need to have a remake of Star Wars for adults."
"We all know that Yoda was doing it with Chewbacca." "Oh, god, my eyes!"
"Oh, podrace - time to go to the bathroom."
Moderator, at the beginning of the panel discussion: "On that note, let's begin with squee."
In response to the comment that historical slash writers should remember that, when they walk into a room of their own house, they don't take much notice of the laundry machine there, so they shouldn't have their historical characters taking much notice of what is obvious to them: "Yes, but it's helpful for the author to know the correct terminology for obvious objects, so that they don't have the character thinking, 'There's that metal box with a door.'"
Quoting a fellow reader with a tad bit less knowledge of history than she should have: "Oh my god, I'm so offended - do you realize that sailors in the eighteenth century were misogynists?"
"I think there's a progression from vanilla porn to 'Fuck me gently with a chainsaw.'"
"If you're going to write 130,000 words of UST [unresolved sexual tension], that better be damn good sex."
"You have to draw a line [between what you write about and how you live your life]. This is me writing [a violent story], and this is me going to the grocery store and not knifing the idiot in the check-out line."
During a discussion of gender-transformation stories: "I was having a problem with my story: You can't have boy/boy sex when one of them is already a girl."
"When I'm having a really bad bout of self-editing, I switch the font to Wingdings."
"What are your squicks?" "I draw the line at men and women together."
"We do not want to fight a test case [on the legality of fan fiction]. We have better things to do--" "Writing porn."
One the current lack of variety in media coverage of fandom: "When Congress wants to know how fandom works, it calls Henry Jenkins."
On how fandom is not a single entity: "We are not the Borg."
I should clarify, if I didn't manage to at the time, that I don't remember specific policy discussions on the issue and wasn't speaking ex cathedra, as it were; but from what I do know of policy decisions so far, I would be very surprised -- and disappointed -- if this were not the case. I am not on the Content Policy Committee, but it seems to me that who are we to tell you something isn't "fannish enough"? But please do note that I wasn't speaking as the Voice of the OTW on that point.
If you want a more official answer, please contact the Community Relations Committee at <comrel@transformativeworks.org>. For what it's worth, though, my co-mod for the panel is on that committee, as was another staffer who spoke from the audience, and neither of them spoke up to disagree with what I said during the panel!
Thanks for a great con report (and for the link to Manna, which was recced to me months ago and I hadn't managed to track it down yet; bookmarked!).