Being Promiscuous in the Oceans of Shipping

So in between seeing my therapist and failing to write more of my crossover, I’m part of a group on facebook for fanfiction writers. As you might imagine, this is a lively group, and interesting topics of discussion frequently pop up. One such topic, was this one which popped up yesterday:

“What do you guys feel about homosexual/yaoi fanfictions? I know its extremely popular to ship two men (even if they are not gay) together, but what do you think?”

Comments and opinions abound, and I was planning on adding my own to the comments section, but I was planning on doing a blog post on my opinions of yaoi, and on my opinions of shipping in general anyway, so this seems like a good prompt with which to start it.

I have an interesting relationship with ships, which, if we’re sticking with the nautical theme here, can be best compared to that of a pirate with a very odd sense of loyalty. While in the seas of Doctor Who for instance, I am in the employ of several ships – the HMS 11/River, the SS Martha/Mickey, The Good Ship Jack/Jenny (the Doctor’s daughter) and the Queen Vastra/Jenny (Flint – there are too many Jenny’s in this fandom!). None of these ships happen to overlap or have a rivalry with one another, so I am able to move between their services, and be paid for both of them.

But then there is the great ocean of Yu-Gi-Oh! and this is where my loyalty vanishes, and I shamelessly play the field like a pirate prostitute. I sleep on the Tendership one day, and the next day, I’ve hopped ship to the Thiefship, or the Angstship. I jump between Peachshipping and Puzzleshippingf freely. I squee when I see Blueshipping on the horizon, but at the sight of some good dirty Puppyshipping will make me drool equally as much – and indeed, if half way through this I spot the flags of Polarshipping in the distance, I’ll dive off the ship and swim for it like the kraken is on my tail. The fact that some of these characters are involved in more than one ship does not deter me. Or to bring this metaphor down to a more understandable conclusion – I have no One True Pairing when it comes to Yu-Gi-Oh!

No One True Pairing?! I hear you cry. Surely this is impossible! You must have one ship involving Bakura that you love above all else? How dare you be promiscuous with these characters?! Well I dare. And I do. Because honestly, if you asked me which I love more (Tendershipping, Angstshipping, Thiefshipping or Bronzeshipping), I really wouldn’t be able to tell you. Each appeals to me for a different reason. It depends largely on how the characters are written in the fanfiction, and how the author makes them develop, which brings me nicely onto the subject of my crossover, where pairings have been raising some questions.

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat – there are no canon pairings in Yu-Gi-Oh!. I’m sorry, but there aren’t. I laugh in the face of anyone who suggests that they dislike my story because I’m not following canon, because there is no canon. A canon relationship, to me, is a relationship who’s existence is confirmed beyond denial in the work of fiction, or by word of God. And by confirmed beyond denial, I mean either direct physical confirmation or direct verbal confirmation. I’m not talking about significant looks across the room, clutching someone’s hand during a tense moment, or one character heeding a request to show some compassion (yes Silentshippers, I’m looking at you!). I’m talking two characters kissing in a way that leaves no room for doubt. I’m talking a character saying quite definitely to another character “yes, they are a thing now”. Whether that thing is a potential marriage situation or just a fuck-buddy situation doesn’t matter. As long as it’s beyond the point of friendship, and there is definite evidence for it, it’s canon. Otherwise, you’re just speculating.

So when it came to my crossover, I felt that I had a lot of freedom with the shipping. The characters had done a lot of developing in Witches Wizards Shadows and Souls, and I felt that I now had pairings in mind, which would make sense for my characters, given how they had developed over the course of my own writing. So while in Yu-Gi-Oh! canon there’s no hints of any relationship of any sort between Ryou and Malik for instance, I felt that over the course of Witches Wizards Shadows and Souls, that they had grown close enough as friends for them to possibly take the next step into a relationship.

I shall now take cover as my fangirls shriek in joy at this first official confirmation after twenty chapters of solid hint dropping.

But here’s the point guys – I didn’t go into writing Witches Wizards Shadows and Souls with the express intention of making those two characters gay. I went into it intending that they would be friends, because it made sense to me. They were both lonely characters, who’s alter egos had been far from pleasant roommates, and both of whom probably felt that they were the ‘outsiders’ when put next to the Inner Circle of Yugi, Joey, Tristan and Tea. It was natural for me they would band together in the face of what my plot had to throw at them. The fact that they got closer than I anticipated was a surprise to me as well – characters do that. I know I’m writing it, but they genuinely do have wills of their own – just ask Kisara.

Some people might say that there’s no evidence that Ryou and Malik are gay in the canon. And that’s true – there isn’t any evidence to suggest that they are gay. But equally, there’s no evidence to suggest that they are straight. Human beings don’t have a ‘default setting’ when it comes to sexuality. That might sound like a sweeping statement, but I have an upper second class bachelors degree in Media Studies, and I feel that I am qualified to talk about the nature of sexuality in fictional characters because of it. So to that end, on goes my academic cap, as I introduce you to the noted sexologist Alfred Kinsey.

In 1948 and 1953, Kinsey and several other researchers published a series of reports, titled Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female. These reports introduced the idea of a scale of sexual orientation, known as the Kinsey Scale. This scale ranges from 0 to 6, with 0 being individuals who identify as exclusively heterosexual, and 6 being individuals who identify as exclusively homosexual, with all the grey area in between. The scale is a fluid one, with the reports also stating that an individual may be assigned a different position on the scale at different stages of their life – in other words, a person’s sexuality can change over time. This is not to say that it has to change over time, but that the option is certainly there.

There are some arguments against these reports, and obviously Kinsey was writing about real people, and not fictional characters, but I feel that these are a good basis with which to understand sexuality – three quarters of a million copies would suggest that there is something in it.

So, to go back to the original question on the forum, specifically to the point about shipping two men, even if they are not gay, I do not see this as an issue. Because as Kinsey suggests, there is nothing to say that someone who identifies as straight cannot change their mind if the right person comes along, or vice versa. I feel that as long as there is a reasonable arc of character development that supports the creation of this relationship, that there is no harm in a fanfiction author pairing up two characters who have previous shown no homosexual (or heterosexual) inclinations. Sexuality is not a simple matter, and neither are human beings. And nor, by that extension, are the great oceans of shipping. We should feel free to jump from ship to ship, secure in the knowledge that all of your pairings are One True Pairings, and equally as possible as the next.

And now if you will all excuse me, I just saw the SS Adlock sail this way, and I must don the appropriate battle dress before I board. Avert your eyes, ye of a squeamish disposition!

A Public Service Announcement from Mei

So, as most authors know, the most terrifying thing that you can experience is losing your work. Most things can be replaced or repeated when they're lost, which is why nobody can really appreciate the devastation you experience when you lose your writing, apart from other writers. Rewriting might sound like a simple enough thing to a non-writer, until you consider that those files were a culmination of years of work, lovingly crafted and sculpted with as much attention as any master stonemason. And that's before you factor in the simple truth that it is impossible to write the same thing twice - no that's not exaggeration. It is literally impossible to write the same thing twice. You can write the same events, but they will never come out the same way and with the same flow that they did the first time, and you will always unfairly judge them against the first long lost draft.

I did this recently with a scene from chapter twenty five of Magic Monsters Dominions and Destiny. It was a lovely scene, that I spent the better part of a day working on, getting the interactions between the two characters just right (not easy when they're both ancient Egyptian spirits having a deep discussion about their place in the world next to noisy London roadworks). And then through the deviance of the copy/paste feature (yes, all right, and my own stupidity) it was gone - vanished in a puff of binary, lost to the forest of cyberspace.

I was distraught, and immediately started redoing it, in the hopes that some of the lingering inspiration would help me reclaim what I had lost. But as the words were pounded into the Word Document, I could feel the smooth syrupy flow becoming sticky, and that magnificent inspiration evaporated. I stared at my new scene, a shadow of something beautiful and great, and I wept.

Dramatic, I know, but surely understandable to a degree? You wouldn't ask a painter to redo a piece of their artwork exactly the same as before if someone knocked their jam jar of water onto it, would you? Because it would never be exactly the same as the last piece - it would have a completely different kind of energy and feeling to it. It is the same for writing. Each piece of creativity that we authors undertake is unique, and cannot be replaced or replicated to the same standard that it was before. And certainly, when most of us have several hundred thousand words under our belts, it would be downright cruel to make us try.

So I was understandably horrified today at lunchtime when I plugged in my memory stick to do a little bit of editing over my sandwich, and found that the computer refused to recognise my USB device, telling me that it would run faster on another USB port. Sensing something amiss with this, I tried the second USB port, which yielded the far more alarming message that my USB device had malfunctioned and could not be fixed. Doing my very best not to panic, I put the memory stick away and went back to my sandwich, hoping that my laptop would be able to assist me when I got home.

I feel it necessary to clarify at this moment, that this wasn't one or two current projects that I was fussing over. Oh no. This memory stick is the primary location for all of my stories written in the last six years. And I mean all of them. It contains research, character sheets, plot summaries and timelines, and so many notes, in addition to proper grown up stuff, like the most up to date version of my CV. Now this may sound like a stupid idea, to keep all of my important things in one easily breakable location, but it's simply the most practical option for me. I write everywhere. I write at home. I write in Costa on Saturdays. I do editing at lunchtimes at my desk. I write in airports while I'm waiting for planes. I write on my laptop, a desktop computer and my netbook. It is simply not convenient for me to keep my writing on one computer.

I make regular back ups of my files to my laptop, netbook, spare memory stick, and even email important chapters to myself, just in case. But suddenly all these seemed insufficient in the face of losing my memory stick. I couldn't remember the last time I'd done a back up - it certainly hadn't been since last weekend when I made that all important progress on chapter twenty one, and I was pretty sure it hadn't been before I'd done that all important connecting scene in draft two of my novel. The prospect of having to start all those wonderful scenes all over again, never quite reaching the same quality as before, sent me into a state of near hysteria. And sure enough, plugging the memory stick into my laptop earlier this evening yielded the same messages. Malfunctioned. Not recognised. Nice job breaking it, dumbass.

I entered full on panic mode as I ripped the memory stick out of the second USB port and plugged it into number three of four. This time, I was rewarded. Access! To my precious precious files! How could I have been so callous as to not back them up sooner? I immediately copy/pasted everything to my laptop, holding my breath as the little green bar crawled slowly across the page, the estimated timer getting higher and higher until I was sure that at least one of my files must be corrupted. Then finally, peace. My heart resumed normal beating pace. Which was just as well, since my hand then accidentally brushed the memory stick as I sank gratefully onto my bed, and the computer suddenly realised what it had done, rejecting the device so hard you'd have thought it were carrying the computer equivalent of the Ebola virus. But it didn't matter - the files were safe on my laptop. I promptly backed everything up again onto my spare memory stick, and emailed the most important documents to myself. Crisis temporarily averted.

If you take anything away from my outpouring of concentrated relief, let it be this. Back ups are your friends. Your very best friends. And you cannot have enough of them. Buy memory sticks. Make sure that they are good quality. And back up everything. Even stuff that you don't think you will use. During NaNoWriMo, you are advised to back up your novel once a week. I'm starting to think that this isn't overcautious at all. In fact, why don't you go do it now. I'm ending this blog post anyway. So off you go. Back it up, and thank me later.

The Camp fire is dying down: The Unknown Dangers of Chick Lit

It's getting to the end of another Camp Nanowrimo, and as I limp the last few thousand words to the finish line, I'm struck by how hard it's been this time around. Oh sure, it's had the usual hiccups of Nano - procrastination, things cropping up, my own stupidity of running two big projects side by side - but there's something that has been nagging at me for a while, and only now have I fully realised what it is.

When I was planning out the first five months of the year, and setting myself lots of lovely deadlines to teach myself discipline, I was very careful about Camp Nano. I normally have dilemmas on what to write, normally winding up with two ideas and being unable to pick between them. In this case, I was torn between two of my really old pieces of work, that in the last few years have been pulled out, dusted off and begged to be properly revamped: Shadow Summoners, an Ancient Egypt based Yu-Gi-Oh! fanfic that had a pretty solid plot behind it but suffered from terrible writing when I first came up with the idea seven years ago. And So This Is, my first foray into chick lit, which ended up staggering to a halt on fictionpress once I reached university. In this case, the characters were pretty well formed, but the plotline was lacking something.

I started prodding at Shadow Summoners back in 2012 during Nano, and I ended up running both projects side by side. So This Is, ended up being my Camp Nano in July 2013, so in both cases, I would be adding to the word count, rather than starting straight from the beginning. I had plenty of inspiration for both of them, and I was sure that they would both be able to carry me through April with no difficulties. But which to choose?

I looked at all my projects from January to March and realised that, while I loved them all, most of what I was writing was dramatic and full of death. This isn't terribly surprising for me. Anyone who's read my stories is well aware that I have a proclivity for murdering the human race, and even on occasions when I've withheld that particular urge, death is still a constant companion of my stories. Anyone can die and often they do. Even my fanfiction crossover series, which has one of the lowest death counts in my history of writing, features a particular nasty death at the end which reduced me to a steady stream of tears as I typed it out.

So I took all of this in, and realised that it would probably be better for my mental well-being (on tenderhooks these days thanks to my stupid thyroid) if I wrote something a bit more cheerful, and so I naturally pounced on So This Is. It's chick lit, I thought. Plenty of happy teenage problems to blow out of proportion, and fluff so sweet that you develop cavities. Sure, there will probably be a few emotional moments, but most of them will be positive, because that's the kind of genre it is. What's not to be happy about?

I am the world's stupidest author.

Chick lit is a million times more emotionally gruelling than the most nightmarish apocalypse. And I think it's to do with the reality of the chick lit genre. It's knowing as you write that somewhere in real life, someone is being verbally cut down to size by the school's queen bitch until she breaks down into a paranoid, anxiety fuelled mess. Somewhere out there, someone's grandfather is being diagnosed with dementia, and she's miserably wondering if she should have cared enough to notice sooner. Someone's ten year old brother is dying of leukaemia. Someone's mother is contemplating risky behaviour just because she doesn't want to have another baby. This isn't just something happening in a story. These are real problems, that everyone can go through.

It's miserable.

I haven't cried this much over a story since Magic Monsters Dominions and Destiny. And the ten year old brother hasn't even died yet, which I know is going to be the most difficult scene of the lot. Nothing prepares you for the gut wrenching moment when you have to pull these character's lives apart. Every character needs to be pulled apart and built back up in a story - that's how they grow. But there's something about doing it in chick lit, and knowing the reality of these kinds of situations, and the normalcy of the characters that just hurts you a little bit more. Or maybe it's simply that in chick lit the death is more personal because you have to become so intimate with these characters in a different way than you perhaps would in another type of genre. Chick lit has a more personal emotional heart to it, and maybe that's why it hurts more.

All I can say is, once So This Is is over, I will not be writing chick lit again for a while. It takes a stronger author than me to properly do justice to this sort of writing, and I need a proper break from so much death and misery.

Now if you'll all excuse me, I'm going to get on with my magical girl cosplay. At least that's light hearted and cheerful.

Stumbling blocks to 50K

So Nano has kicked off for my seventh year of participation, filled with plot twists and resting bags of peas on my wrists for a week after it’s over. But when it’s over I have 50,000 more words than I did at the beginning of the month, so I mustn't complain.

I mustn't. But I will.

My motivation for Nano is always subject to fluctuation, depending on the various things going on in my life at the time. These tend to form hurdles on my sprint to 50K, and their size varies greatly depending on how tempting or pressing they are. This year though, I seem to be trudging rather painfully towards the end, even though to the outside gaze, it looks as though I’m doing swimmingly (17K on day 4 is a pretty good result by most people’s standards).

My blocks this year have ranged from the tiny little pebbles to huge mountains on the track in front of me. My big problem is that I have a very short attention span. Even now, writing this post, I’m itching to go and do a million other things. My anxiety doesn't help – when I have deadlines looming or things that I know I should get done, my body goes into a state of nervous tension until I can get them finished. This makes me even more erratic, and any hope of concentration I had goes out of the window.

Other things get in the way. Even though I’m resolutely focused on writing this story, my other stories (particularly fanfictions – Sisters of the Infinite Schism and Shadow Summoners, I’m looking at you!) are waving coyly at me from the sidelines, trying to entice me over with their sexy plot twists and curvaceous characters (River Song and Kisara in particular are being really flirty with me right now!). I’ve spent the last few days listening to one track on my iPod over and over again, purely because its inspired such a wonderful scene for Shadow Summoners that it makes me want to put my Nano on hold and run off to write it. But this way lies demons, mainly because I cannot chunk write (with me, it dramatically attacks the flow of my writing), and doing this scene now would not turn out well.

If these stories are the mythically beautiful sirens on the side of the track, waving at me enticingly, then Pokemon Y is the massive hedge in the middle of the track (you know, the kinds of hedges that are single-handedly responsible for tripling the mortality rate of horses in the Grand National). I cannot emphasise how much I want to play this game. I’m growing rather attached to my team, even if it is currently suffering from a rather glaring lack of balance, with three fires, two waters and an electric type. I get very fond of my Pokemon in my games (yes I know they’re strings of computer code – shh!) and I don’t think I can be blamed for wanting to continue my adventure.

But I have to be good. To that end, I’ve taken to playing it in the one place where it is impossible for me to write – the bath. There is something rather satisfying about reclining in hot water and Lush bubbles up to my neck and level grinding like a woman possessed. All I’d need is a cup of tea to make the image perfect.

And of course, my friends and boyfriend are still here – this is the one thing I will stop for on the Nano track. They’re just too important to me. Jenny and Rob are back for a few days this week, and I’d never miss the chance to spend time with them. Then we’re still in Tennerfest season, and I have three in a row this week (White D’or, Duke of Richmond and somewhere else yet to be decided). Craig is busy too, fighting off the demons of term paper and other assignments in between his job, so at every point he manages to find a second to squeeze himself online, I'm there.

So I have enough obstacles and things to stop for on this track as it is. But the worst thing is that I’ve also got a dead weight dragging me back as I try to claw my way towards the finish line.

I'm always critical of my work, but lately this has morphed into something very real. It’s very rare that I like my writing any more. It’s been building over the past year, but its only since Nano started that I’ve fully got a grasp of what it is. Its like there’s no spark of life in my writing – it’s just words on a page, that don’t inspire anything. I look at my friends like Craig and Jess who are churning out masterpieces, and my own work feels stilted in comparison. And it scares me.

And it’s killing my Nano. I might be writing fast, but I hate what I'm writing. I know you’re not supposed to like your first draft – that’s the whole point of Nano. You’re getting the first draft out of the way. But even all my other first drafts had something inside them; a little ember of something beautiful, just waiting to have petrol thrown on it. But everything I write lately just seems to be a dead lump of charcoal.

I can’t give up on writing, even though it sounds like I might be. It’s the only talent I have (or had). All I can do is claw on down the track and hope that this deadness in my words doesn't last forever.

How I "Got Into" Writing

One of the questions I hear authors get asked all the time in interviews is, “how did you get into writing?”. I always wonder if authors are just as perplexed as I am when they hear this question. “Get into writing”? Writing isn’t like a musical instrument, which you actually have to pick up and learn. Writing is something we are all taught to do from about the age of three or four. And children make up their own stories way before they have learned how to correctly hold a pencil.

So I’ve never really accepted that writing and creating a story is something you have to “get into”. I see it as something every child has been doing from the minute they started dreaming. But to give a less philosophical and more definite answer, I was writing from a very young age. But when did I start writing. When did I actually think to myself ‘I can do this seriously’? I was sixteen. But the process that led up to it, began much earlier than that. It started with one fangirl who discovered through her friends that maybe she could indeed do something with her life, and not just sit, be lonely and watch movies forever.

I have no shame in admitting that I was the social outcast of my year – not the only one admittedly, but as I soon learned in school, being a social outcast yourself doesn’t make you safe from the other social outcast’s wrath (and they are no less vindictive than the popular people). Words like ‘nerd’ and ‘freak’ were normal modes of address for me, and while I bear these labels with pride now, I had less grace and even less backbone back then, and took my slated position in school very badly. My self esteem was rock bottom for most of my school career, and I was convinced that I had no talent in anything, save a rather strange ability to recite movies and tv shows almost word for word.

I’d dabbled in story writing ever since I was six – writing short ones about my teddies, and daring adventures with my friends, like any self respecting child with imagination does. But these were little projects to amuse myself, and of no value, or so I believed, to anyone.

But then I turned sixteen and something amazing happened.

I’d been loaned off my friend Tai (or as she is sometimes known, Meuble) a rather hefty wedge of paper that was titled “Harry Potter and the Something or Other” (and which I do believe I still have a copy of somewhere in my room). This rather impressive mass of pulped trees, had been written by two of Tai’s friends, who were dabbling in the art of Harry Potter self insert fanfiction.

I was completely enthralled. The concept of putting yourself in someone elses story and having your way with it had never occurred to me. My mind started ticking over ideas and possibilities. I knew I wanted to try this. But I had no idea how to go about it.

On a whim, to see if I could provide my mind with inspiration, I began compiling lists of completely random things, among my limited circle of friends. Asking them what animal they would be if they had the choice? What magical/super powers would you choose for yourself? If you could own any mode of transport, what would you pick? And suddenly, a new idea took hold. A little story, just for fun, involving me and my five best friends, and all our answers to my favourite questions.

This ‘little story’ quickly evolved into Random Scribblings of Bored Minds, a collaborative effort between all of us, that ended up spanning 88,583 words long, taking us into outer space, turning our skin yellow, violating many speeding laws, and traumatising Lord Voldemort with hugs.

And I was having the time of my life! We were our characters! We were doing things we would never be able to do in real life! We were being ourselves and getting away with it! We had a loose but definitely existent plot going on! We had a talking lyrebird and a cursed emergency water landing button! It was exhilarating!

Slowly it dawned on me, that not only was I creating something fun, but I was actually good at it. I was churning out pages like a machine, and to my untrained sixteen year old eye, they were pretty good. Certainly most of my class bullies could not do this – the only out of class writing that they participated in was sending text messages containing gratuitous use of the letters “OMG!”. Obviously now the curtain of cynicism and self editorial has fallen over me, and some parts of that story make me groan. But even now, eight years on, I still laugh at the jokes, and smile at it in the same way I would smile at a child trying to build a treehouse out of leaves and fistfuls of mud. Because it was the moment when I realised that contrary to what the rest of my year thought, I actually had some fucking talent!

And the means to develop it were only moments away.

As previously mentioned, Tai had provided me with my first introduction to the world of fanfiction. But she was not going to leave it there – oh no. This was a world I was born for, and I am eternally grateful to her for introducing me to fanfiction.net. It was my paradise. The possibilities were mindblowing. I could practise writing whatever I wanted. I could let people read it and leave comments. And most importantly – it was the internet, and I had a penname! Nobody knew it was me! I trawled for months, and then eventually worked up the courage to start posting.

Like most people joining fanfiction at that time, my big love was Harry Potter, and so unsurprisingly my first fanfiction was a Harry Potter one, and like almost every fanfiction author, I look back on it now and perform the well practised headdesk manoeuvre. But I will never delete it, because it represents the start of my serious writing (now I had deadlines to meet and fans to please as well as myself) and most importantly, is a reminder of important lessons that I learned along the way.

I did learn, and I blossomed. I taught myself about description and dialogue. I learned how useful a thesaurus was. I discovered the perils of shipping and fangirls. I figured out how to leave clues to my plot all over my story. I learned that characters have to grow and change in order to be interesting. I discovered a love of yaoi that will last a life time. Even as I finished my A-Levels, left school and headed to the big scary world of university, I never looked back. Why would I? Writing had become a friend, and a flower of self confidence that now bloomed in my hands.

University was the structuring of my talent. The rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation that I had missed out on by not doing any English related A-Levels now came back to haunt me, and I had to teach myself quickly where all those curious little marks went. Fortunately, there were Emmersonne and Yuallica, who encouraged my ideas, and would introduce me to the literary miracle of NaNoWriMo.

By the end of my first year of university, I was moving out of the Harry Potter fandom, and had been camping happily in the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandom. And as the summer holidays began and I vanished off to Portugal with some friends for a holiday, I had another project in mind that was soon to become one of my proudest achievements.

If fanfiction had thrilled me, crossovers were a dimension that I completely adored. After the enjoyment I’d found in doing Random Scribblings, I knew I could be good at crossovers. Reading Harry Potter and Yu-Gi-Oh! crossovers was a thrill, but I realised very quickly that they were all exclusively about Voldemort getting his hands on Shadow Magic, in some form or another. And while there was nothing wrong with this format, I wondered to myself if I could not try something different. Of course I knew that season four of Yu-Gi-Oh! is a source of constant debate in the fandom, with some liking it, some tolerating it, and some ranking it with the same disgust that they would direct towards a corrupt politician, smothered in cocaine. I knew that some people would hate it. I knew that I was jumping on a bandwagon. But I wanted to write it, so off I went.

The results were phenomenal. I wrote almost 400,000 words, the most I’d ever dedicated to a single project. I finished it, which was an achievement that I had only been able to do a handful of times. And seeing the reviews come in was one of most rewarding experiences in the world. Yes, the sequel sat in limbo for about three years. But it is a mark of how much my crossover meant to me that I eventually did pick up the inspiration again. And the beauty of it was that after so long, watching how my writing had improved filled me with one of those cliché warm glows that everyone bangs on about.

Speaking of cliché  it would be remiss of me not to mention the Anti-Cliché and Mary-Sue Elimination Society, the brainchild of my rather brilliant and crazy best friend, Emmersonne. You would have thought after so long I would have had my fill of self inserts. But no. This was far too good an opportunity to pass up. And as the few stories grew to over two hundred, and our number of members expanded from two to over twenty, I found my circle of friends expanding once again, and most importantly, lurking in that circle, was someone I would soon call my boyfriend.

On the writing front, the Society reminds me to lay back and enjoy the ride of writing sometimes instead of editing myself inside out. And it too was a learning curve. I found myself developing a sense of humour. Not the kind where I rattle off jokes every few minutes, but a very real and cynical type, based on the three S’s of British humour – Sarcasm, Self Depreciation, and Deadpan Snarker. Parody was taking the piss in a beautiful way – and I really really enjoyed doing it. If only I had developed that particular skill back in school...

I of course wrote other things as well in this long period of eight years. There are more unfinished stories on my computer and in my memory stick than I’d care to count. There are countless self inserts that have now been hidden away from the light of day. And deep in these folders are my impossible fantasy worlds, my sappy teenage chick lit, and my poorly written sex. There are hundreds of characters, who I still love in their own way (even the villains). Several of them have gone to sleep deep in their stories, while others come out every so often for playtime. I have an entire cast who have been rehoused in different stories four times! I have now found a world that I think works best for them, and plan to go back to it someday. I have a fanfiction that I started five years ago, and which I have now unearthed, dusted off, and decided to start slowly rewriting. I have a piece of cliché, sappy chick lit that I look at every so often, and wonder if it still has potential.

And of course, my novel sits front and centre of my non-fanfiction related stuff, currently plodding through its second draft. Sometimes I love it. Sometimes I get frustrated with it. But this is a healthy relationship, (not something I just “got into” like a musical instrument), and I will see it through to the end.