Fanfiction questions and answers

[vilakins]

I started writing this a few days ago. By now, it's gacked from several people.

What is your alias?
Vilakins when on LJ, my real name on my site. [shrug]

How did you choose it?
Vilakins? All variations on my name--and all my nicknames from primary school onwards, including Spitfire and Rommel--were taken, so I used my yahoo ID. I chose that because I love Vila and it's an affectionate pet name for him.

What fandoms do you write for?
Blake's 7, sometimes crossed with others. I've written one Farscape story.

What fics are you currently working on?
- A past multiverse orphan about Picard's and Blake's crews meeting
- A current multiverse fic I can't talk about until it's posted
- The big PGP (sadly pushed to the back burner)
I should be writing a Doctor Who / B7 crossover, but I haven't even started it yet.

What fandom did you start in?
Blake's 7. It's not my first fandom, just the one I was driven to write in when I saw it in 2001 and got depressed by season 4 and its ending, and wanted to fix it.

What is your deepest darkest fic-writing secret?
I don't think I have one, unless you count the saga I made up as a teenager, which owed far too much to Star Wars.

Do you have any quirks/habits in your writing?
I have to get up and pace around the room to think plot and dialogue through. I also write from the beginning of the story to the end, although scenes may appear in my mind in any order.

Do you have any fanfiction pet peeves?
- Bad grammar and spelling
- misuse of apostrophes
- said-phobia (I especially loathe 'opined' and 'intoned')
- name-phobia (IOW over-use of epithets like 'the blonde pilot')
- far too many good stories are trapped in zines

Do you have an OTP?
Sorry, but I'm one of the handful of female fans who aren't here for the pairings. For me, it's the characters, their friendships or enmities, and the occasional dollop of hard SF. I have however written Vila/Kerril, Vila/Soolin, and Vila/OCF, and Avon/Servalan.

Comments

[hafren.livejournal.com]

- far too many good stories are trapped in zines

Do you mean as in "trapped because the zines haven't come out when they should have" or "trapped" as in "on paper and I don't want to read them that way"?

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't mind reading them that way, but I can't rec them to others because the zines are either no longer available, or too expensive for many fans. I've acquired a lot over my obsessive five years in B7, but most new fans don't know about zines. Many zine stories are also on-line, but I know of certain zine editors actually discourage people posting their own stories, even when the zine was published years or decades ago and is no longer selling.

I prefer to read from paper myself, but I'm happy to print out. I'm also considering offering my own zines from my site if people would like nicely-bound versions with illos, but I would never tell people that was the only way they could read my stories.

I've had stories published in Chronicles and a couple of Tales from Space City, but both of those allow reposting online, Chronicles after a year. I like that. If I had the energy, I'd take over its editorship so that it could continue. I'm thinking about it.

trapped because the zines haven't come out when they should have

Oh yes, a very annoying problem. I rescued some of my stories from zine limbo.

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

I prefer to read from paper myself,

Me too, I usually printout any story longer than a page to read in comfort of my arm chair. Being fairly new to on line fandom I would love more out of print zine stories to be put on line somewhere, I would even volunteer my very slow typing to get them onto a site if it were needed.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

This is where OCRs come into their own.

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

OCR? this is the first time in a coons age I've come up against an abbreviation I don't understand.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Optical character reader.

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

Simple when it's explained, yes I want one of those ink is so expensive, at least for my printer. It only cost £30 to buy and full price cartridges are £15. I guess they have to make their money somewhere.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that happens a lot. :-(

OCRs aren't bookpads (though when those look like books and don't have light-emitting screen that tire my eyes, I'll get one). They're scanners that turn scanned text into electronic text, so you don't have to type stories in by hand.

[kerravonsen]

I thought it was "Optical Character Recognition". And it isn't the scanner that does the job, it's the software -- you don't need a special scanner.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Yep, it is 'Recognition'. :-P I don't have the software, and I've seen from some Hermit stories that it can be buggy. At least one Sheila Paulson story consistently had characters interpreted wrongly.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

The software isn't that good, even now:(. I've found that it's much faster to just type something up rather than scan it in and then spend ages and ages fixing it, it gets so many words wrong.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

It's probably pretty good on well-printed stuff, but some of those old zines were bad photocopies of manually-typed text. I have a few which are hard enough for me to read.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

I've tried it on some recently published reference books with perfectly clear text in a reasonably large fonts and mine still buggers the text up. I've since deleted the software from my computer so I don't even remember what it was called now. Bah.

[kerravonsen]

No, it's still not perfect, true, but when I was updating a manual for work, the only copy we had was a photocopy of the original printed version (the software had originally been written by someone else, and that was the only copy of the manual we had been given). I did a little test on one page, and while typing up the page took about the same time as scanning-and-correcting the page, seeing as I'm not a touch typist, it did take me longer, and would have given me RSI if I'd had to type in the whole manual. So I went the scan-and-correct route.

If I had to import something from printed hardcopy, I'd probably do the same. Couldn't do it at home, though, since I haven't found any good OCR software for Linux. And my scanner isn't working at the moment.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I'd rather scan and correct too, and a spell-checker must do a lot of the work for you.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

- far too many good stories are trapped in zines

WORD. Expensive and hard to find. It's just not right. Fanfiction is so much about sharing stories with the common people that it shouldn't be imprisoned in formats that cost more than hardback novels to obtain. Grr.

[shimere277.livejournal.com]

In their day, fanzines were great. But the internet is a much superior medium. Not only is it cheap, it's instantaneous, and you get to be your own editor - to choose what you want to read rather than have it chosen by someone else. Better too from a writer's perspective - I don't think I would have ever submitted to a fanzine. Waaaay too much stress for something which I do for the joy of it.

There is something to be said about paper. Might be cool once everyone gets high speed internet to see a greater use of PDF or some other formatting so that we really could assemble and print our our own fanzines. I used to do that with the Oblique Publications stuff, but at the time it annoyed me because I still had an old skool modem.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

Money *is* an important factor--the further back you go to zines, the more you'll find stuff that's... well, not as good. I'm always surprised at the fact that some of the earliest zines had editors that actually rejected stuff but still allowed rather rubbish stories with massive misspellings in. Something as elementary as spelling Vila as Villa--when you could check the spelling of a name from the end credits and wouldn't need any reference books for that sort of stuff. It just comes across as laziness more than anything else. And destroys any illusions one might have of quality control. (Not that it can't go OTT with some editors, mind, with seemingly frivolous attitudes to what's quality and what's not.)

Zines are good when you don't have access to a computer with an Internet connection, but otherwise I feel the cons outweigh the pros.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

But the internet is a much superior medium.

I got jumped on a few years back when I suggested as much on a mailing list. Their argument was that the internet was very expensive for some and inaccessible to many. However, I found all the zines I have by using it. :-P It does have one huge disadvantage though: sites disappear and if you haven't printed a story off, it's lost.

I hate those PDF layouts in columns with tiny print. They're impossible to read on screen and I only print what I really like and want to keep. And my printer's been broken for months. :-( I need a high-speed laser.

[kerravonsen]

I hate those PDF layouts in columns with tiny print. They're impossible to read on screen and I only print what I really like and want to keep.

Hmmm. Thing is, PDF layouts are really intended to be printed. That's what they're for. And when you have a printed A4 page, two columns is much easier to read and more compact than having the whole text with those wide lines in one column.

I got jumped on a few years back when I suggested as much on a mailing list. Their argument was that the internet was very expensive for some and inaccessible to many.

It was possibly me or Julia who mentioned that. If I was snappish, it was probably partly because I was annoyed at people who demanded that I put my zines in HTML format on the web, and... well, somewhat the attitude that people are touching on here, that I'm selfish for actually wanting to print zines which have nice layouts and beautiful illustrations, and the fact that it costs money to do so apparently makes me greedy.

I toss my hands in the air. Zines are dead. I still have copies of Refractions #5 and #6 in a box in my cupboard. I might as well burn them. I even have a fireplace where I could do so.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'm not attacking zines per se! I have two packed shelves of them, I've had stories in Chronicles, I'm considering offering illustrated zines of my own work on demand (if there is any) from my site, and I'm even wondering about taking over as editor of Chronicles. Unlike some recent zines, it does actually get published and authors can post their stories a year later. It's just sad that so many stories can only be found in zines and are thus inaccessible to most new fans.

I don't have a printer at the moment so I can only read off the screen. :-( Before, I used to print stories to keep and reread, and after all, they can also disappear off the net. Re the PDF columns though, I don't find A4 pages hard to read if the font is a decent size.