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I am very, very bad at promoting my own work, and it's not the usual reason of shyness or imposter syndrome. Oh, I did my rounds with those (I think most professional women have), but I beat those demons if not dead than insensate by watching how men behaved and using that as a license to act the same. Rather, I tend to neglect promoting my work because I run out of time and I despise social media!
Today is the first day of summer break, so I can't use the time excuse, and Dreamwidth isn't really social media to me, at least in the same way that Twitter and Tumblr are (and don't even mention Facebook; the see-you-next-Tuesday word sounds less foul to my ears). So! Here are some things I've done that I want to share.
First and most (to me) importantly is my Independent Archives Survey. The background: Some fandoms (like Tolkien) used to have many independent archives, which I'm defining as a fan-run site for sharing fanworks that is unaffiliated with any corporate or nonprofit organization. Most of those archives are gone, and most of those that remain are inactive. Part of the problem is that there are few options available for building archives; eFiction used to be a go-to, but it has not been updated in a while, and the code is no longer stable.
About a year ago, I took on a Drupal project and decided, while working on it, to draft a tutorial for building an archive in Drupal, the content management system used by the SWG. Basically, I was seized by the "be the change" impulse that has directed so much of my life and decided to make independent archives an option again, knowing full well it would likely be a pet project that no one would GAF about but me. I plan to record that tutorial this summer, but the OTW/AO3 situation has suddenly made people interested in independent archives again. (No comment.) So this survey will help me get a sense of where the interests and needs are so that I can direct my own work accordingly. No matter what, I'm making my tutorial. Drupal is a platform with a lot of potential, and I've already drafted the entire thing. But where I'll head after that? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Survey data will help tell.
In the meantime, if you create or read/view fanworks in any fandom, I appreciate your input. Here's the link again: Independent Archives Survey.
Next, I've been doing a series on Cultus Dispatches, the SWG's fan studies and history column, about the term "canon." I really enjoyed writing last month's article: Affirmational Fandom, Transformational Fandom, and Two Old Tolkien Fanfics. Part of it was the journey to discovering these "two old fanfics": Lindariel was the one who discovered that the "research article" titled "A Study of the Hithlain of the Wood-elves of Lorien" was in fact mostly fanfic. For more than eighty years, it went unlabeled as such, at least as far as I've been able to find. George Heap's "Departure in Peace"—which appeared in the same issue of I Palantir—has been dubbed "the oldest Tolkien fanfic" for a long time, so it wasn't obscurity but, I suspect, that the people who had looked through that issue thus far saw the research paper format and filed the piece under "Research" rather than considering that most of the content was entirely created by Arthur Weir, the author, and not Tolkien. I don't think it's coincidental that it took a fanfic writer to spot it for what it was. All the more reason why fans of all stripes should be doing fan studies and fan history work.
The second cool thing about working on that article was how many similarities exist between fic then and fic now. I mean, "Departure in Peace" is an apologia for Sauron, anticipating all the reams of digital pages fans would spend in the online era writing to understand this or that villain. And, as the article argues, the two stories placed side by side illustrate perfectly that Tolkien-based fanfiction uses both affirmational and transformational elements.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention that my presentation Stars Less Strange: An Analysis of Fanfiction and Representation within the Tolkien Fan Community is now out in the proceedings of the Tolkien Society Seminar "Tolkien and Diversity." That meant that my work appeared three times in printed books within the past year, which I'm pretty stoked about!
Today is the first day of summer break, so I can't use the time excuse, and Dreamwidth isn't really social media to me, at least in the same way that Twitter and Tumblr are (and don't even mention Facebook; the see-you-next-Tuesday word sounds less foul to my ears). So! Here are some things I've done that I want to share.
First and most (to me) importantly is my Independent Archives Survey. The background: Some fandoms (like Tolkien) used to have many independent archives, which I'm defining as a fan-run site for sharing fanworks that is unaffiliated with any corporate or nonprofit organization. Most of those archives are gone, and most of those that remain are inactive. Part of the problem is that there are few options available for building archives; eFiction used to be a go-to, but it has not been updated in a while, and the code is no longer stable.
About a year ago, I took on a Drupal project and decided, while working on it, to draft a tutorial for building an archive in Drupal, the content management system used by the SWG. Basically, I was seized by the "be the change" impulse that has directed so much of my life and decided to make independent archives an option again, knowing full well it would likely be a pet project that no one would GAF about but me. I plan to record that tutorial this summer, but the OTW/AO3 situation has suddenly made people interested in independent archives again. (No comment.) So this survey will help me get a sense of where the interests and needs are so that I can direct my own work accordingly. No matter what, I'm making my tutorial. Drupal is a platform with a lot of potential, and I've already drafted the entire thing. But where I'll head after that? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Survey data will help tell.
In the meantime, if you create or read/view fanworks in any fandom, I appreciate your input. Here's the link again: Independent Archives Survey.
Next, I've been doing a series on Cultus Dispatches, the SWG's fan studies and history column, about the term "canon." I really enjoyed writing last month's article: Affirmational Fandom, Transformational Fandom, and Two Old Tolkien Fanfics. Part of it was the journey to discovering these "two old fanfics": Lindariel was the one who discovered that the "research article" titled "A Study of the Hithlain of the Wood-elves of Lorien" was in fact mostly fanfic. For more than eighty years, it went unlabeled as such, at least as far as I've been able to find. George Heap's "Departure in Peace"—which appeared in the same issue of I Palantir—has been dubbed "the oldest Tolkien fanfic" for a long time, so it wasn't obscurity but, I suspect, that the people who had looked through that issue thus far saw the research paper format and filed the piece under "Research" rather than considering that most of the content was entirely created by Arthur Weir, the author, and not Tolkien. I don't think it's coincidental that it took a fanfic writer to spot it for what it was. All the more reason why fans of all stripes should be doing fan studies and fan history work.
The second cool thing about working on that article was how many similarities exist between fic then and fic now. I mean, "Departure in Peace" is an apologia for Sauron, anticipating all the reams of digital pages fans would spend in the online era writing to understand this or that villain. And, as the article argues, the two stories placed side by side illustrate perfectly that Tolkien-based fanfiction uses both affirmational and transformational elements.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention that my presentation Stars Less Strange: An Analysis of Fanfiction and Representation within the Tolkien Fan Community is now out in the proceedings of the Tolkien Society Seminar "Tolkien and Diversity." That meant that my work appeared three times in printed books within the past year, which I'm pretty stoked about!
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