Yuletiiiiiiide

[sholio]

Nominations are open and, after a great deal of dithering, I've put in mine. \o/ Unless I think of something I forgot and have to change my form.

My nominations:

C J Cherryh - Alliance-Union universe
Karin Lowachee - Warchild series
Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman - The Death Gate Cycle
Stephen King - Under the Dome
Tobias Buckell - Xenowealth series
Vivian Vande Velde - Never Trust a Dead Man

Looks like it's all book fandoms this year. I haven't actually figured out how many of these I'm writing for (well, Warchild for sure; still thinking about the others, but I wanted them in there just in case).

I always feel kind of weird and uncomfortable about writing in book fandoms. It feels so much more ... personal than writing for big media fandoms. I don't have a philosophical problem with other people doing it, and I'm perfectly cool with the idea of other people writing for my stuff. But I absolutely do not write fic for original universes created by people I know (without their permission and approval, anyhow), and there's a sort of ... continuum of comfort for me, I guess, between the really obscure stuff and the really popular stuff. I feel less weird about writing fic for, say, Stephen King's books than for some self-published author that most people have never heard of. And I'm a lot less likely to write fic in open, ongoing universes -- Dresden Files comes to mind here, for example; I wrote a little, nonspecific, it-could-go-anywhere-in-canon fic awhile back, but while I have been speculating rampantly about what the next book might hold, I really don't have any desire to write fic for it. I just want the BOOK. If it were a TV show, I think I would probably be filling the hiatus with all kinds of post-finale fic, but for a book, not so much, and it's not that I have to stop myself from doing it or anything -- I just don't want to.

Comments

[skieswideopen]

Yeah, I don't generally don't have any urge to write in book fandoms either. I rarely even read them. (Though I did nominate Alliance-Union for Yuletide. And I do occasionally read Dresden Files or Vorkosigan fic.) There's just something about books, with their single authors and (often) more tightly drawn plotlines that doesn't move me to write in the way that television shows do. I think for me, it's partly that there are just fewer gaps to fill in.

[sholio]

Yeah; I think it's a combination of having fewer places to stick fic into (I'm not all that interested in writing fic for tightly plotted TV shows, either), and feeling very aware that I'm a guest in someone else's house. Media (TV & movies) are more like a frat party in which people are constantly coming and going; one more isn't going to stand out. *g*

[skieswideopen]

Agreed--for me, the best TV shows to write for are the ones with gaping plot holes or promising plotlines that they set up and never follow through on or shows with lots of UST that they apparently never plan to resolve (i.e., the main thing that lured me into The X-Files back in the day--one of my first fandoms).

And yes, there are so many people working on and writing for the average TV show that it seems less...invasive, somehow, to write fic for those than for books.