i love to tell a story

[melannen]

I have this Good Omens Easter fic that has been living in my head for so long that when I go back to GO I legitimately forget that not only is "the first time Crowley ever slept was that morning in the first century when he was pretending to be a guard at the latest guy-who-clamied-he-was-the-Messiah's tomb" not canon, it's also not even fanon, because I've never mentioned it to anybody.

And every Lent I think to myself "this should be the year I actually write the fic", and every Palm Sunday I sit down after church and re-write the first scene and then go "aaaauggh I need to do more research."

You might be surprised to find how little there is out there in terms of resources for "how to read the Easter accounts in the gospels in context with archaeological evidence and non-Christian historical accounts of c. 30 BCE Jerusalem". I mean, most of the information exists, I have been trying to gather it together since before I read Good Omens the first time, but seems likeit's in pieces here and there, each with a different slant, because all of the people who have the different pieces have different ideological reasons to not want to be the resource that connects it all. Because they have no compassion for fanfic writers, clearly.

And, of course, the same fraught reasons the easy research resources don't exist is the reason I don't want to write the thing without having access to them.

So this year I finally finished my Republic of Two Systems Independence Day story instead. :P

Just Born (2166 words) by melannen
Fandom: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen | Breq, Gem of Sphene, Translator Zeiat, Lieutenant Tisarwat, Piat, Seivarden Vendaai
Additional Tags: Republic of Two Systems Independence Day, Food, vengeance
Summary:

Seivarden and Sphene bond over their shared Notai heritage.

***

Also! staranise is working on a guide to DW for Tumblr users who want to move, and she's asking for people to subscribe/add some mock accounts that she can use for tutorial purposes - if you have some accounts laying around, and you want people to move from Tumblr to DW, check it out. There's also a community, fictional_fans, that she'd like a variety of fandom-related posts and conversations in to use as a demo - if you would like to help, you can go post either a real fandom-related post or a fake one, either is fine!

(however I would kind of like to see it become a real community. Part of the reason fandom communities have never taken off on DW, I think, is that we're a small enough pool of users that it's hard to get critical mass on any specific topic - they tend to either die of malnourishment or get dominated by one or two members to the extent they can't really grow. But I bet we could get critical mass for "fandom in general"! And I bet DW, as it exists in 2018, could actually support a comm that was just "anything fandom related for any fandom" without it getting out of control the way it would on a larger platform. And if it was a living community it would be a great place to send new users to welcome them! Anybody want to help me try to make it real?)

Comments

[umadoshi]

And if it was a living community it would be a great place to send new users to welcome them! Anybody want to help me try to make it real?

I really like the thought of this happening. ^_^ LET THERE BE FANDOM.

[melannen]

We can but try!

[naraht]

First, I would LOVE to read that Good Omens fic.

Second, that "fandom in general" community does already exist on Dreamwidth. Sadly, it's fail_fandomanon. The weird thing is that it actually seems to be working fairly well nowadays, but I do wish that something like that existed that wasn't anon. I wonder if there's room for two?

[conuly]

There is definitely room for two, and this would allow those of us who aren't FANS but just, you know, casually dip our toe into meta now and again to participate without it having to be a big "thing".

[melannen]

So would I!

fail_fandomanon does what it does pretty well, but it has SO MUCH cultural stuff you need to figure out before you jump in that it is not very welcoming. I've read stuff about how lots of unspoken community norms is actually a useful way of moderating a tough-to-moderate space (like an anon comm) by keeping out people who aren't already deeply invested, but it makes it tough to draw people in. (And, you know, one of the good things about DW is it's got moderation tools! You don't have to depend on a community self-modding using social pressure!)

And being anon makes it tough to do things like promote your own work. Or, you know, make new namespace friends. So I think a community like this would end up doing different things than f_fa. And that DW's current community, at least, is self-selecting enough that it could work.

[naraht]

No arguments about any of this! I just find FFA fascinating. It's the most active fannish community on Dreamwidth by orders of magnitude I'm certain, and it's amazingly good for some discussions (I've had more YoI meta there than anywhere else), but the anon thing can be so frustrating sometimes. And it hardly seems to impinge on the rest of Dreamwidth at all.

To be honest I'm not sure I'd want FFA to be much more active - it's hard enough to follow as it is!

I suspect it'll be hard to get a panfandom community going without a specific impetus like the one that gave birth to FFA... but there's no reason not to hope.

[dhampyresa]

a comm that was just "anything fandom related for any fandom"

I would be into that, especially if it were a place people could ask for/provide fandom/canon recs.

[melannen]

Well, I'm thinking that at the rate posts show up on DW comms, it should be fine to just leave fictional_fans with basically only two guidelines: 1) OPs must be fandom-related somehow, and 2) don't be an asshole. On the off-chance it got wildly popular, that would stop working, but if it got wildly popular we could do spin-off comms.