Isn’t it weird that even when you love to do something you end up procrastinating?
I love writing; I love the buzz in my head from all the people and plots that swirl around in there, bouncing off the inside of my skull. Sometimes it feels so busy it’s like I can’t concentrate on anything else. When I was younger and in school my teacher always saw me as the daydreaming type. They’d be kind about it, during parent teacher conferences they’d mention that I was always looking out through a window, far away in my own head. Of course they thought I was dreaming about the hot, popular guy in the class above me. In reality, I was playing out stories about how Lestat and Louis or Daniel and Armand from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles was living happily ever after. But it was easier to pretend to be embarrassed then say that I was making up gay romances in my head.
This was in High School, so a good 7-8 years before I found fandom and started putting all stories down on paper, I thought it was just me, LOL!
It’s strange though, when you like to do something so much and you still drag out on actually doing it. Although, maybe like isn’t the right word exactly. I remember when I started writing fan fiction, back then I enjoyed it. I’d scribble down two-three thousand words and then post, no editing, no beta, barely a spell check. The quality reflected the work I put into them, but I had a lot of fun.
Something changed. I mean, obviously writing is something that always grows and changes alongside with you as a person. It’s something that develops and hopefully constantly improves, especially here in fandom where encouragement and feedback is so available. I certainly hope my skill has improved over the years. Even with my own overly critical eyes I think there’s a mile wide difference between my first story and my last one. But I always want my next story to be better than the last, the characters more well developed and three dimensional. The bad guy’s less like Disney villains and more like people, the world more tangible. I want the grammar to be better, the spelling mistakes fewer and the vocabulary more developed. I have no delusions of ever becoming a “Great Author” I’m content writing fluffy, cute stories that probably will never be good enough to become “real books” because it makes me happy, but I still want every new story to be better than the last.
But again, something has changed. It’s not fun anymore, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it but it’s not a hobby anymore, it’s something I need to do. It’s like an itch, I feel alone, empty when I’m not working on a story, when my head is quiet. My last two stories the characters have felt so vivid, so alive sometimes I’ve felt like I have to rein them in to fit inside the J2 AU world I created for them. To fit the fandom characters I wanted them to be a version of.
Now I’m sitting here with a new plot and new characters bouncing around in my head and I can’t see J2 or any other fandom in them, they’re just mine. trendykitty has been telling me since “Fucking Kodiak, Alaska” that I should write an original story, but I’ve not had the confidence. I still don’t. I have a hard time believing I can write a story people would want to read without a fandom and established characters to work with.
But, it seems these new characters swirling around in my head isn’t giving me a choice. They’re jumping around in my brain telling me who they are and even if I tried there’s no way I can turn them into a J2 version. So, I guess I’m trying my hand on an original story.
I don’t know if it’ll actually become a story, but I’m putting it out here now, so that if someone asks what I’m working on now, I won’t chicken out, lie and say a new J2. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it if I actually manage to turn it into a real story. Hell it might end up as fan fiction anyway, but I guess I’m going to try to write a story that’s all mine, start to finish.
I guess whatever happens, it will at least be interesting.
PS. No, this doesn’t mean I’m leaving fandom or that I’ve stopped writing in fandom. It only means I’m trying something new but I’m not going anywhere.
Xenodike
Xenodike 