vilakins | Online fandom

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writing

Online fandom

If there is at least one person in your life who you consider a close friend, and who you would not have met without being part of an online fandom, post this sentence in your journal.

One? They are legion! Well, a contubernium or two. (Roman geek here.)

Since we're discussing on-line fandoms here and there, mostly there (because Blake's 7 has, uniquely I gather, a fixation on printed zines with the web a rather dodgy cousin) what do fellow fans think? Should I put my stories in the Hermit library as well as my site in case I get hit by a meteorite? It's a pity there's no gen or mixed site equal to Liberated as I hate the star rating system Hermit has where readers can say how much or little they like a story. I don't have the self-esteem to cope with that.

Any other ideas? I like

altariel1's one of using an LJ (

deadship) for her fiction. Is it worth having one anyone can post to? I know several people who don't have sites but might like to publish that way, and others could post links to their fiction.

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I think it would be great if you posted your stuff to the Hermit library. IMHO it's good to have as many stories as possible in a central archive where everybody can easily find them, and Hermit is where I invariably send people when they ask me where to find B7 fic on the web (as a newbie or two has at various times).

Personally, I like the existence of the rating system a lot. As a reader, it helps me decide which stories to read, and as a writer it gives me an idea of what people really think of my stories' quality, in a slightly more objective way that what they might be willing to say to my face does. :) But I can understand why it might turn you off. If it helps any, I can't imagine that the ratings your stories would be likely to get would be anything but an ego-boost, but, hey, maybe I'm biased or something...

Not everyone likes Vila, believe it or not. There are people who'll mark a story down for not having enough Avon or Blake. But I suppose I should gradually put my outstanding stories there and just not look to see what people think.

The other problem I have is being unable to edit a story if Richard's put a page-break there. He links to stories and sets up the paging generator to recognise certain phrases. I've stuffed up stories that way and am afraid to bother him too much about fixing them.

There are people who'll mark a story down for not having enough Avon or Blake.

Well, with the exception of one or two people I shall be tactful enough not to name, I like to think people in general are sensible enough to be able to tell a story focusing on characters they don't happen to be interested in from a story that's intrinsically bad.

The other problem I have is being unable to edit a story if Richard's put a page-break there.

That problem I didn't know about. It is annoying not being able to edit stories. I have fits over that with Leviathan. You have to format it just so, and you can't preview exactly how it'll look before you post, so it's really easy to mess it up, and if you do, you have to e-mail the site maintainer and get her to fix it.

Mind you, once I've posted a story to Hermit, I generally figure I've done all the editing I'm going to do with it...

True. It's a right pain though when you see a typo in the first line of a page (as I did) and know you can't fix it because said page and all following would disappear. :-(

I still haven't had the heart to check that a couple of dorked stories have been fixed. But I shall bite the bullet and submit some more.

I just looked. There are only five real stories on my site that aren't on Hermit. This is a worry. Only five written in almost two years? Three stories are going into zines, but still. I can't count the 'short and silly' stuff or my LJ ones as they're all 500 and under. :-( I really must write some more 'proper stuff'!

Like that PGP and various other ones roiling around in my head...

I can't count the 'short and silly' stuff or my LJ ones as they're all 500 and under.

Did you write them? Then they're writing.

Do they have a beginning, middle, and end? Then they're a story.

They may not meet traditional publishing criteria for story lengths, but no one ever accused the net of being traditional.

I know of many fanfic writers who archive their 'short and silly' and drabbles. Sometimes, no matter how much you want, you just don't have time to pay attention to a full length.

Hmmm. 'Short and silly' is a section on my fiction page for weird stuff like really off-the-wall PGPs and the crew on Coro St. I'll look at my b7friday stories though and definitely archive some of those. Thanks.

I say: Post on Hermit. And set up an lj archive for your work. Both in addition to posting on your own site.

Apart from unlikely meteorite storms, the more places you archive your work, the more people read it. I know that often B7 fans think this is a small, closed community, and relatively speaking it is, but the web brings in new fans all the time, as do the rereleases of B7 on whatever the new viewing medium is. These newbies can have a hard time finding material - unless you already know it's there, even Hermit is not easy to locate. Witness the number of US fan sites that are set up, then abandoned to become cobwebs, when their owners realise there are already B7meta sites out there. The more sites there are devoted to it, the easier it becomes for them to find.

Besides, don't your fic deserve as many chances as possible to be read?

And I think the fixation on zines v. net is a case of an aging fan base for an aging fandom. When I first arrived in fandom, the idea that you could run an entire group online was ludicrous. Some people still feel you need that personal interaction to have a succesful fandom. It's not just B7. A lot of ST-TOS feels the same way.

Which reminds me, I should dig out my old zines from allthewayback. There were some good stories in them, and it's nice to hold the paper in your hands now and then.

Oh, I'm glad I have my zines, but it took me a lot of time and persistence to find and buy them when I became a fan a couple of years ago; others night not bother. I will put some more fiction on Hermit, but it's not exactly archived there; they link to my site and reformat.

I'll think about the LJ option. I think I'll need a WYSIWYG client so I don't have to go through all the text in HTML to find italics etc. Up till now I've dome all my LJ HTML myself.

Hm... bung the stories on Hermit and then don't look back?:) I'm with Betty there, I think your stories would get pretty damn good ratings. But I know that's not the point. Still, I'd vote for putting them up there.

And damn it, short and silly *counts*.

OK then! Not sure about the short and sillies (cos they really are). I do have links to my LJ fic from my site, but I might put some of those in both places too.

I absolutely agree with

snowgrouse that "short and silly counts"--and in fact, I've seen some wonderful short-shorts and drabbles that say a lot more than some so-called
proper stories.

Admittedly I don't like the Hermit rating system because I get lousy ratings, but what really bugs me about Hermit is the gorram front end. If I'm trying to look up something in a hurry, it always trips me up because I didn't re-set the le-se parameters.

Another option is to have links but not stories on Hermit, the way Oblaque does. In general I think PDFs rock'n'roll, although I hate reading two-column PDFs on screen.

I've been thinking about the LJ option too--how much stuff can one put on a Deadship-class J?

As much as you like, I think! There's a size restriction on individual posts, but if you hit it, you could just post a story in parts.

I hate PDFs if they're in columns. Why not just have them in one?

And I will whack some shorties on Hermit too. Once Richard has sorted out the two stories which don't paginate properly.

1. About more short fics on Hermit: yay!
2. About PDFs: readability studies show that lines of more than 65 characters are hard to read, hence double columns.

1. I'll have to put them on my site first so they can be linked to Hermit. I wasn't planning to do that (they're just links on an LJ fiction page now) but what the hell.

2. I often make my window narrower to read on-line fic; I suppose that's why. Hmm. I usually set a size 10 font for fiction on my site; would 12 be better?

In terms of making things readable, 10 point is the minimum (which is why it's required by US law for the fiddly bits of contracts), 12 probably is better, although the things that really make a difference are the amount of leading and the x-height of the font.

Whatever makes them go online, oh my, thus speaks the Poor Student who sees zines as being mostly waaaay too expensive to justify buying. Yes.

And me here at the edge of the world. I bought a lot of them 2nd-hand a couple of years ago just to get my hands on stories when I first became a fan--postage from the US or UK was a killer--and acquired most of the B7 part of a late fan's estate here. Some of them, like the Southern Sevens, are wonderful; others are a bit patchy but there's usually at least one story in each to make it worthwhile. There are only two gen zines left now though. The web is definitely the way to go, but I get the distinct impression from older B7 fans that only printed stories really count. Sigh.

Aye, this came up when I first got into B7, and I've never heard of another fandom having such an obsession with print, at least none that I've had any contact with. Find it bizarre meself. Meybe am too young or some such.

I hadn't heard of zines before B7, and I found it odd too. I've got three stories in Chronicles though cos it's an Australian zine and I felt like supporting it. I can put those stories up after a year or so, so that's cool.

As someone who came to the on-line community through links from links from Hermit, I say put them there. I've never paid attention to the rating of the stories.

As a reader mostly of non-fiction I tend to differentiate between the author and what they are saying. A good writer can make something I have no prior interest in fascinating. I've also slogged my way through tedious writers because I wanted to know more about the subject.

Hence my problems with PGPs. I like happy endings, but a lot of you prefer angst and misery. You also write it so well I have to read it and say well written, shame I don't like it.

I like happy endings

You and me both! (I must really get back to my PGP which does turn out well for all the surviviors.)

PS. When I do write sad stories, as I have occasionally in

b7riday, they're in the context of the season or episode they're set in. But my desire for something better than that last ep is what drove me to write, and what any PGPs or AUs will deliver.

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