More like a joke on myself?

[swan_tower]

The other day I commented on Twitter that I’d written 6000 words that day: 2500 words of what I needed to be working on (Night Parade), and 3500 of surprise!fanfic for one of my own damn novels.

And I do mean fanfic, in the sense that the story I produced isn’t trying to do the things an independent short story would do. It will mean very little if you haven’t read the novel (and contain egregious spoilers to boot), and the conflict it’s resolving — at least in part — starts well outside the bounds of the story itself. So it’s not the kind of thing I could ever attempt to sell.

Ergo, the natural thing to do is post it online as a freebie.

And if I’m going to do that, I might as well post it on April Fool’s Day. Not because it’s some kind of bait-and-switch on you guys, but because what better day to share Oops, Accidental Fanfic?

So in congratulations for surviving March, and to provide a bit of entertainment as we go into April, I give you “The Long Fall,” a post-canon fic for Turning Darkness Into Light. WARNING: CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS.

(Also, side question for people who know fannish etiquette better than I do: would it be weird for me to post this to AO3? I haven’t made any secret of the connection between my pseud there and my professional identity, and I don’t know whether having me show up in my own fandom would feel out of place. It might be one thing if there were a hundred fics for the Memoirs, but as of now, there’s a whopping eighteen.)

Comments

[sovay]

I haven’t made any secret of the connection between my pseud there and my professional identity, and I don’t know whether having me show up in my own fandom would feel out of place.

I have seen at least one other writer do it to well-appreciated result, which inclines me to believe it is not viewed as obnoxious, but I am about the opposite end of the spectrum from a primer on fannish etiquette, so definitely wait for someone with better credentials to weigh in.

[swan_tower]

I know it's definitely been done, and people haven't been stoned for it. I just . . . I dunno, I feel weird? Especially since my comment to friends when I finished writing the book was "I hope people are left with the desire for post-canon fic about [this particular aspect]" -- but if I post my own version of that, it feels a bit like I'm bogarting that narrative space for myself or something. Which is silly because, uh, it isn't like actual published canon stops people from writing different imaginings of how something might go. But when the fandom is this frickin' tiny, I don't want to make the people writing in it feel self-conscious because I've shown up in the sandbox.

[choirwoman]

Your version is only one of the myriad possible versions! I'd say go ahead and post it (without disclosing your pseudonym perhaps).

(but don't take my word as gospel, I have exactly one story up on ao3)

[alexseanchai]

I think if you're posting it on AO3, that in itself cues people to know it's not canonical, even if the canonical author wrote it. And people won't necessarily know the canonical author wrote it, either: I keep seeing people surprised to learn what pro published name is attached to astolat, and that's been common knowledge for years.

[swan_tower]

So you'd recommend posting it, but without saying anything that overtly flags it as being by the canonical author?

[alexseanchai]

👍

[mindstalk]

Or you could go the other way, make it explicit that you don't want to discourage any other writers or alternative takes ("Aaron Mornett, terrorist leader").

[mindstalk]

I'm amused by the idea of writing fanfic of your own work but I see the logic. And nothing wrong with your AO3ing it.

[choirwoman]

I wrote fanfic of my own work too! Set 500 years later, in "modern" times.

[mindstalk]

I read it. Pretty good. And yeah, it's like a lot of 'fix it' fanfics I've read in mood and "you know the background".

OTOH, haven't many pro authors written stories that aren't fully independent, but meant to be read as part of a cycle? I'm not sure, it's not something I've paid attention to, not that I've read many mordern pro short stories.

[swan_tower]

Yeah, fanfic is not just a context of production and consumption, but also a mode of storytelling. There are very perceptible differences between "The Long Fall" and even the other Lady Trent short stories -- which are arguably not fully independent, either. I've seen some reviews of "From the Editorial Page" which criticize it on those grounds, and I'll cop to that being even more true of "On the Impurity."

I've got a half-finished blog post about tie-in stories -- meaning not things like licensed novels for a media property, but shorter works an author produces that spin off from their own books. I think there are a few different types, and which one you choose has a strong effect on how independent it actually feels. Post-canon stories are probably the least independent of the lot, because they almost inevitably are spinning out the consequences of events that aren't within the story itself. Backstory works pretty well, on the other hand, so long as the author remembers that it needs to have a satisfying plot and not just be a bit of "look at this character when they were younger!" fluff. I've definitely read stories from pro authors that were pretty disappointing when I read them as Actual Short Stories, but which might have been fun if I'd read them as fanfic.

[mindstalk]

Tangent: I know Segulism "is" Judaism, but do you have anything making it clear what Harmonian and Nakhonian mean? I'm reading "Impurity". (And my mind had to adjust to realizing it wasn't about the impurity of Draconeans. :p )

[swan_tower]

"Harmonian" comes from the English word "Harmony;" the random micro-backstory for it in my head is that it's a Scirling tradition which is kind of reformed and flexible, relatively speaking. Nakhonian, though, I don't remember what I got the word from, just that they're meant to be the more rigid, High Church equivalent.