Beyond Selidor

schneefink asked me to post about fannish things I read/watch to cheer myself up. As I tend not to reread fanfic, I've chosen to interpret this as 'media that I feel fannish about, which I read/watch to cheer myself up.'

My ultimate comfort reread is the Pagan Chronicles series by Catherine Jinks, which I have read so many times that the spines of my books are split and cracked, and the pages are torn in places. I almost know them by heart, to the point that when I read them I'm no longer sure if I'm actually reading the sentences, or completing them myself in my head. This series is like the written equivalent of a warm blanket, and the best thing about it is it can be enjoyed on many levels.

On one level, it's a Monty Pythonesque piece of historical fiction, set in Jerusalem during the Third Crusade and Languedoc in the late twelfth-early thirteenth centuries, hilarious and poignant, and well researched. On another, it's a series of interrelated coming-of-age stories, about dispossessed, damaged, orphaned people mentoring and learning from one another and healing each others' brokenness. In fannish terms, it is the published equivalent of emotional hurt-comfort. Its characters are like old friends; they've been with me since I was ten years old, and I'm not embarrassed to admit that I've occasionally imagined them at my side during times of difficult, fear or anger. It's always helped.

In terms of TV shows, Buffy is the one I always come back to, for similar reasons. Over the years I've liked different things about the show, and learnt different things from it, and identified with different aspects, but it's always been a constant. I rewatched the whole series while writing my Honours thesis, losseniaiel and I picked out individual episodes to watch over the course of our MPhil year (and this was, in fact, how we came to be such good friends during that time), and the first thing I did when I submitted my PhD was sit on the couch and watch Buffy.

As I said before, I don't really reread or rewatch fanworks, but I do adore the fanvid 'Starships', because it's such a heartfelt celebration of fannishness — what it is to feel so deeply about stories that you seek out like-minded people to discuss, explore, and remake them — and it just makes me really happy. I rewatch it from time to time, and it always lifts my spirits.



Apologies for the lateness of this post. Life just caught up with me a bit, and before I knew it, it was the end of term.

schneefink asked me to talk about fandoms I wished were bigger. For me — someone whose fannish feelings always seem to direct themselves at tiny book fandoms that, if not fandoms-of-one, are usually fandoms-of-two (where all tagged posts on Tumblr are written by me, the now-dead LJ comm was set up by me, and any fic that exists is written by me, and the second fan's activities are usually confined to passively liking my posts) — the glib answer to this is 'all of them!'

I talked quite a bit yesterday about my favourite authors, and there's a large degree of overlap between the books of the authors mentioned yesterday, and the fandoms that I wish were more active. In the case of some — Kate Elliott, Sophia McDougall — there is some discussion out there, but it seems to be of different works to those I'd like to discuss. (So Elliott's Cold Magic series and Black Wolves, and McDougall's Mars Evacuees series. All are fabulous books and I love them a lot, but I wish others felt as affectionate towards Elliott's Crossroads series — it's even set in the same world as Black Wolves! — or McDougall's Romanitas trilogy.)

Apart from the works I mentioned in yesterday's post, there are a handful of other fandoms I wish were bigger: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon, An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir, and The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan. (In the case of all three, there is a bit of fannish discussion on Tumblr, but — and this is such a small fandom problem — everyone else seems to like different characters to me!) My other intense fandom-of-one is Jo Walton's Tir Tanagiri Saga, where I've been lucky enough to meet pretty much the only other fan, sulienapgwien, who turned out to be awesome.

That being said, for all my whining about my small fandoms, I've been lucky in all of them to avoid some of the problems that plague mega- or even medium-sized fandoms. There is remarkably little drama in any of the fannish communities that have sprung up around these works — there are so few of us that I think everyone collectively decided to be generous, supportive, and positive about any fannish activity, even if it's not focused on our preferred characters. When you're in a tiny fandom, any fanwork is welcome, and all discussion is a pleasant surprise. I'm not sure I'd trade page after page of fanworks on Ao3 for my calm, if inactive, little fannish oases.

dhampyresa asked me to talk about 'things I wish people in fandom knew'. For the purposes of this post, I'm interpreting fandom as fanworks (fanfiction, fanart, reviews, commentary, meta, and other types of fan creation, made as an unpaid hobby) fandom, and mainly the corners thereof with which I'm more familiar ('Western media fandom', as it's sometimes called). I do not think of fandom as a monolith, and when I talk about 'fandom' in this post, I'm talking about the parts of it in which I hang out, not every single fannish community in every corner of the internet.

Honestly, the one thing I wish people in fandom knew is fannish history.

I'm not talking about having an encyclopedic knowledge of the writing of Robert Heinlein, or knowing exactly which obscure fanzine was the originator of the term 'slash' - those sorts of things are often used as gatekeeping, and I think gatekeeping in fandom is a terrible and harmful thing. What I'm talking about is knowing where fandom has been before: what mattered, what were the burning issues being debated, what were the controversies, what were the established norms (and, if these changed, why), and who was having these conversations, and where. That way, we could avoid fighting the same battles over and over again, every time fandom moves to a new platform, or every time a new cohort of people enters fandom.

Tied up in this is my sincere wish that people in fandom cared more about written records. To put it plainly, it worries me that so much fannish activity is currently taking place on Tumblr - an unstable platform in which links can be broken whenever a user changes their username, and which is owned by Yahoo. It worries me that a lot of the platforms previously used for keeping records are now obsolete, or were taken down in response to complaints by people who were recorded there behaving in an unflattering light. It worries me that we are so reliant on platforms not owned by us, and that the transmission of fannish history is dependent on a mixture of web archiving and, essentially, oral history. (This is also why I am generally in favour of platforms like Dreamwidth and Archive of Our Own. It's really important to have platforms owned and curated by members of fandom, because they're less vulnerable than those owned externally.) I don't think of myself as a particularly long-standing member of fandom - I've only been here for nine years - and already I can recall multiple attempts at large-scale rewriting of history, history that I was around to witness and events that I know went down in a very different way to how they're now being portrayed.

I worry about this because it leaves fandom, especially its newer, younger, or otherwise more vulnerable members, open to the manipulations of abusive people. Two recent examples spring to mind: in the wake of the US election result, I witnessed two notorious scammers and abusers (one of whom has literally used fandom to create a cult, on at least three occasions) promoting themselves as figures of trust and authority to LGBT youth traumatised by the prospect of a Trump presidency. I'm positive that most of the people sharing these scammers' words and promoting them as helpful sources had no idea of their history, and their repeated, troubling patterns of behaviour. But this - while an extreme example - is exactly why I think keeping good records of fannish history is so important. It's not so we can have examples of bad behaviour from far in the past that we can constantly hang over people's heads. It's so that we can establish patterns of behaviour, so that fans both old and new can make up their own minds, using people's words and deeds to determine whether they are trustworthy, whether they've genuinely changed, or whether they're someone to be avoided. It's so we can help people to recognise a potential scam. It's so that we can avoid fighting the same battles over and over again, and reach out to others with whom we share common experiences, interests, and approaches to fandom. It's so we can look back at where we failed in the past, and try to be better.

promiseoftin asked 'What got you into journalism/writing'? This was a bit of a complicated, two-stage process. It's also worth saying that, aside from blogging and the odd bit of reviewing on my reviews blog, I'm not really a writer or journalist any more. But I was for a long time, and for a longer time before that, it was the only career I imagined for myself, and everything I did was geared towards becoming a reviewer/journalist.

I have to admit that, in hindsight, the main reason I gravitated towards journalistic writing as a career was the fact that both my parents are journalists. My father is a very prominent Australian political TV journalist, and my mother is a radio broadcaster; both have been working as journalists for over forty years. Growing up, basically all the adults around me were journalists, so that I developed this unconscious perception that to be an adult with a job meant being a journalist. It helped that reading, writing, and analysing the written word came naturally and easily to me, and that I was encouraged in this, particularly by my mother, who was always telling me that as long as I could write, I would always have a job. By the time I was in my teens, she was pushing me to submit reviews to newspapers and write for student papers, and I was enthusiastically doing so.

That is what underlay my entry into journalism and writing - parental example and encouragement. How I actually started working in this field is quite an embarrassing story. At one point, when I was sixteen, I was having yet another discussion with my mother about books, sparked by what I believed to be a terrible review of my favourite book series, His Dark Materials, in the weekend edition of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper. Mum, who was always one to push and encourage me in ambitious directions, said that I should write a letter to the reviewer explaining why her review was flawed. I wrote an incredibly pompous letter to this poor woman - the children's book editor of the Sydney Morning Herald! - and, to her credit and my eternal shame, she wrote back. Instead of telling me I was being ridiculous (which was very kind, given that in the letter I accused her of not having read the book she reviewed), she asked me if I thought I could do a better job, and offered me the opportunity to review The Amber Spyglass along with two other books that had been my favourites of that year. My review was duly published in the Sydney Morning Herald's yearly roundup where multiple reviewers talked about their favourite books of the year, and I was paid normal reviewer rates. Please, please, people trying to get into writing and reviewing - don't do what I did. I found the letter years later when clearing out my room at my mum's house, along with the letter the editor had written back, and it was absolutely mortifying to read. Most editors are not going to behave like her!

That review was a one-off. I didn't really get a permanent newspaper reviewing foothold until, about two years later, I was having another discussion with my mother about books, writing, and ideas, sparked by a documentary on Roald Dahl that was playing on the TV in the background. I was insisting to my mother that J.K. Rowling owed a debt to Dahl, and that the Harry Potter books were part of a clear tradition of British children's literature that also included Charles Dickens. Mum suggested that I pitch this idea to various newspapers, and, as a new Harry Potter book was about to be published, one paper - The Canberra Times - eventually agreed to publish it. What followed was a ten-year career writing reviews for that paper. They were a great paper to write for, because, until 2013, they had the most amazing literary editor, who was incredibly supportive of her writers, gave me pretty much free rein to write about whatever I wanted, interview whoever I wanted and review whatever I liked in however many words I saw fit, and would make space in the paper for any review, interview, or commentary piece, whatever the length. She was a real mentor to me, and really helped me find my voice as a writer and improve my reviewing skills. I also did a stint on the student newspaper at the University of Sydney, wrote a review of the final Harry Potter book for The Age, and blogged for the ABC Radio National Book Show's blog.

All through undergrad, I was determined to become a journalist or newspaper subeditor. All this writing was intended to get me to that point, and I also did a two-week internship at The Canberra Times as a trainee journalist, where I published scintillating stories on crises in rural dentistry, children's soccer tournaments, amateur theatre productions, and so on. And when I graduated from my undergrad degree, I sort of fell into a subediting job at The Canberra Times by accident, mainly because I was panicking about what to do, asked if they needed any subediting help over the summer holidays, and somehow ended up with first a part-time, and then a permanent full-time job.

And I hated it. I have never been as miserable in my life as I was during that one year as a subeditor. catpuccino and angel_cc will know what I mean, because they had the misfortune of living with me. Looking back, it was the perfect storm of awful working environment (tense, like all newspapers, because of the decline of print media and the resulting loss of jobs), too many changes to my life, and the escalation of the depression that had plagued me since I became an adult, rather than journalism itself, and if I had been less depressed, or could have stayed in Sydney, or worked for a different employer, things might've turned out very differently. But as it was, I didn't last long as a full-time journalist, and fled to the welcoming arms of academia, emigrating to the UK, and thence to the life I have now as a librarian. Throughout all this I continued to churn out reviews for The Canberra Times, as I had done while an undergrad, and as a subeditor, and during the year I worked four other jobs. I only stopped reviewing for them in 2013, when Fairfax (the company that owns pretty much every paper in Australia not owned by Rupert Murdoch) had mass layoffs, including my wonderful editor. We reviewers were offered the opportunity to continue writing for the paper, but, with a drastically reduced features section, and features editing being run out of Perth by an editor who seemed unequal to the task ahead, I could see the writing on the wall. I have not been paid for my writing since. I still love to write, and I miss the ease and fluency with which I was able to put together a review, particular during the middle years of my time writing for The Canberra Times, when I frequently produced multiple reviews in a week. I was incredibly privileged - I got paid to interview Garth Nix, Jeanette Winterson, John Marsden, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Sophie Masson, Gillian Rubinstein, Shaun Tan, and others. Many of those authors were childhood heroes of mine, the writers of incredibly formative books for me, and meeting them as an equal to talk to them about their writing was an unbelievable experience. Making a career out of writing and reviewing was never on the cards - it always seemed to me a very stressful and precarious way to earn money, and even though my former editor has often told me she thought it a shame that I didn't make a huge effort to pursue a career as a freelance writer, I prefer the security of a full-time job and regular paychecks. I really admire those who do - it's a difficult road to follow.

I hope that answers your question, promiseoftin!

I still have spots available for more December posts. You can make suggestions for topics here on Dreamwidth or here on Livejournal. Multiple suggestions are very welcome.