28) What is something you wished you’d known before you started posting fanfiction?
Hm. Well, I started posting yonks ago, back on the old bad days of Livejournal, and it was different then. But--I guess I wish I’d been more conscious of how many readers feel that fic is a nameless transactional exercise. I used to read fics and leave comments and it was so exciting, but I didn’t think of the masses of people who clicked, read, disappeared into the either. It felt so, so sad and bad to work and slave and obsess over word choice, on those early stories, and post, and get one comment. If that. Of course, part of it was that the story was mediocre (because every first fic sucks, that’s just true), and part of it was that I had no name recognition, but you could see the click count rack up and we didn’t have kudos, then, so as far as I could tell everyone just hated it. I think now that it’s more that people skim-read it, got their jolt of whatever, and disappeared. It’s tough, to know that you spent 20 hours on something that someone read for twenty minutes. I think if I could send a little message back to my wee fic-self, I would say, ‘don’t slave away on this expecting people to care. Just write it and get it done.’ It would’ve saved a lot of time, for my teenage self. (I would’ve also said, ‘hey, in a few years this show about two super incestuous brothers is gonna come out on WB, and I know you think it sounds super dumb but give it a shot.’ How fun it would’ve been to be around, in the early days!)
40) Do people know you write fanfiction?
lol, well, you guys do! You count as people. Meatspace people, not so much. My best friend/hetero lifemate does -- former friends do -- my tedious SIL does, but part of why she’s tedious is that she only like snark-characters and standard fantasy plots, so she doesn’t read my stuff. Other than that, no. Makes it rough when my mom’s on the phone like “what did you do today?” and I can’t say I wrote 5k of porn for charity. I probably need more hobbies.
49) Can you remember the first fic you read? What was it about?
Oh, definitely not. That’s far, far back in the mists of memory, on some terrible barely readable Geocities site, probably. Angelfire.com, etc. I’m not even sure what fandom I started with. My guess is FFVII, because I have this vague sense of trying to look something up on the internet about it -- dial-up, tying up the phone line -- but I have zero idea how that shifted over into all of sudden there being yaoi everywhere. --We all called it yaoi back then. I can’t imagine doing that now, haha. But even if I can’t remember the fics, I remember the sheer excitement of scrolling down all these curated lists of fics that felt so illicit -- a lime! a lemon! -- and when people used to warn for gay content -- and when it flipped and people would warn for ‘het’ as a squick -- and how determined and creative they all were, hosting these little sites, linking to each other, keeping the fires stoked. The new web feels very different, doesn’t it? Everything open and yet somehow smaller.
