In which I commit fan fiction

[carbonel]

Writing about Yuletide here is a bit odd, because one bunch the people who read this know exactly what it is and may participate themselves, and another bunch don't know and possibly don't care.

For those who are familiar with Yuletide, the story I wrote was A Matter of Choice, set in Diane Duane's Young Wizards (aka "So You Want to Be a Wizard") universe. The author's name on the story is Jan Levine, because that's the name I use for publishing and writing fan fiction.

For those who are curious what the heck I'm talking about, Yuletide is a fan fiction gift exchange that's been going on for five or six years now. The idea is that you request a story in a small fandom [1] (small because it's something that is either of interest to only a few people, or that used to be larger and has dwindled as people moved on to other fandoms) of your choice, and someone will write you a story in the area that you request. In exchange, you give the listing of fandoms that you're willing to write a story in, and the people who manage the whole thing will pair you up with someone who has requested something that you've offered to write. The stories go live without any authors' names on Christmas Day, and then the authors' names are revealed on New Year's Day. Which is why I'm just posting about my story today.

I've read Yuletide stories for several years -- the writing quality is generally remarkably high -- but this is the first year that I wrote a story for it and (therefore) received a gift story.

[1] "Fandom," in this context, means the particular TV show, movie, book, or whatever that the fan fiction is based on.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

Ooooh, I really liked that.

[sraun]

I'm way behind on the Wizard books, but that was fun!

[aedifica]

I enjoyed that a lot, thanks for posting about it! You seemed to get the authorial voice right on.

[pameladean]

That gets the voice pretty handily.

It also replicates an aspect of Wizards Abroad that I really disliked the first time through, though I got resigned to it, which is that although Nita is the viewpoint character, it's really not her story, but rather Ronan's. Here it's not Dairine's story, either, it's Ronan's and Cat's.

P.

[carbonel]

You're absolutely right that Dairine wasn't the ideal viewpoint character. Initially, it was supposed to be Ronan's story (as requested by the person whose gift it was), and I had planned to write it from his POV. But by the time I had something resembling a plot, I was short enough on time that I didn't feel confident attempting an Irish POV without an Irish beta reader. So I took the easier route -- something Diane Diane didn't have sufficient excuse for.

Writing from Cat's POV would have been an entirely different level of difficulty, because it would have meant incluing stuff that the reader knew and Cat didn't. I considered that briefly, shuddered, and went back to Dairine's POV. Next time, maybe.

[pameladean]

I'm not sure it was a particularly bad choice -- it does tie things nicely to the book. It didn't annoy me in a short piece of fanfic the way that it did when Duane did it for a whole novel. Also, Dairine is a lot of fun to read; I hope she was fun to write.

P.

[carbonel]

Writing it was an exercise in sitting at the computer and muttering, then sometimes producing a paragraph that served the purpose of advancing the plot even if it lacked elegance, and occasionally chortling and having just the right sentence leak out of my fingers.

Possibly that's even the universal writing experience.

On the other hand, finishing the story was sufficient to make me giddy for hours.