~Guidelines of engagement for me and my fanworks

[amara1783]

I've seen a bit of discussion lately about how to engage with fic writers, and people have been making a lot of good points about respecting people's work and being kind. I don't share a fandom with a lot of the people discussing this and I therefore don't know the context for those words being written. Everybody should set boundaries that a comfortable for them. But writers, like any group of humans, are a diverse bunch, and some of the things others are in favour of work less well for me, so I thought I'd just share my thoughts on a few things.

✨Kudos are lovely and comments are lovely, but reading my work obligates you to neither. Please please please do not feel pressured to comment or leave kudos - I want to share my joy with you, not make you feel guilty!

✨You are welcome to, but under no obligation to promote me or my content.

✨Specifically for my tweetfic at Amara1783, I adore audience participation, it is one of the AWESOME things about that format, and getting likes and comments absolutely does inspire and motivate me, but you are under no obligation. This is especially true on those occasions I am asking for input such as with polls or links to Gdocs for peoples' ideas. Your participation is a gift not a duty or a condition of entry. I'm just emphasising this here a lot because the idea of people feeling pressured to participate squicks me. A lot. And now I'm rambling. Eeep!

✨Please do complain about my work in public, on main. Livetweet your criticism! You engaging with something I wrote enough to spend time thinking about it and critiqueing it is, quite frankly, awesome. I value the conversation between our words💖 I love people being opinionated. And, to be honest, if you snark about my writing and I see it, it will probably make me laugh, both with delight at the many many ways we fen see the characters that we love, and also at the freedom that I get to write whatever I want and post it for all the world to see. That freedom is like running through a meadow full of flowers on a sunny day, the wind in your hair, gentle hills rolling down to the sea💃🏻 Erm, yes, so 😆✨

✨If I'm talking about an idea in public then that idea is absolutely up for grabs - if it inspires you to write something, or to want it written, that's awesome. That does not prevent me or anyone else from writing it (no dibs). I am team #MoreCakeBestCake and consider my ideas to be freely available for anyone who wants to use them as building blocks. All of my fanworks are available for further transformative works of any type as detailed on my AO3 profile.

✨Comparing my stories to those of others does the oppostite of make me feel bad - I adore it! I value the conversation, the interweaving threads of inluences and inspiration, and I might find some really cool fic I haven't read! So please go for it!

✨I love concrit and always want it.


✨Including this here for the sake of completeness and because it's really important to me: Please help me be less racist and transphobic.

Comments

[wrote_and_writ]

This is very nice to read. You are thoughtful and as such very easy to interact with, even for shy and anxious people (especially for...). A lot of my formative experience with engaging with creative works comes from grad school, which often turned combative. Of course, the people I tend to interact with here are mainly older (or at least not fresh undergrads) queer women whereas grad school was a lot of White Dudes(TM). There, kindness was often equated with equivocation and agreement, but I don’t think kind and critical are mutually exclusive. Also, at least in my program, you were made to feel inadequate if you simply liked something. If you hadn’t run it through critical lens after critical lens, then why bother? And in this world, that kind of loftiness is so boring. I used to get into huge arguments with my ex about the purpose of grad school and critical engagement. He picked his area of study because it was prestigious (he freely admitted this) where I picked topics because they were fun. I love communities where both fun and thoughtful critiques coexist.

Anyway, thank you for letting me come blabber in your replies.

[amara1783]

This is your idea of blabber? 🧐 If so please come and blabber at me as much as you like! 😊

Your grad school sounds so very tiresome. I dislike that whole 'debate me' culture, and the biased, Western idea that the only way to understand things is through words and logic, things that can be written out on paper and then graded.

Your ex is reminding me of this guy in my philosophy class my first few weeks of uni - we'd had to read a text by Hume, and it was heavy going because Hume wrote in the early 1700s, and I said so as we were chatting before class, that I found it quite hard to engage with the ideas because of the denseness of the text, and this guy (who was Dutch and we were reading Hume in English which would have been a second language for him) says he had no problems with it at all and couldn't imagine what I was talking about. And I am even now amazed at the level of pointless weirdarse performative bullshit.

And OH HELL YES on kind and critical not being mutually exclusive!

[wrote_and_writ]

Oh yeah, my ex was a total goober. Before we started dating, we were in a Chaucer class, and one day he followed me almost to my car to continue our “lively academic debate.” In reality, he freaked me out! It was such a mistake to date him, but who among us hasn’t made dumb choices? I didn’t start dating him until I realized he was physically harmless. Emotionally...? Haha yeah. But I was lucky to have amazing women mostly for professors, and they held the dudebros down pretty well. And I had this awesome professor for my intro to critical theory class — he was from India. He loooooved disrupting the White Male Privilege in class. For example, we were talking about Achilles for some reason, and he pronounced it “AHK-hill-iss” and either my ex or the other guy Rob tried to correct his pronunciation, and my prof said, “I don’t care. I’m from India. This is my accent. I’m not changing.” I admired him so much! He let me write my conference paper on Mal and Inara and Firefly and let me rant about how terrible Joss Whedon I thought Joss Whedon was. It sucked that there weren’t many spaces WITHIN academia for this sort of disruption and discussion, because to me, that is the purpose of education and critical thinking — to disrupt the status quo. But in reality, it is just designed to uphold it. A friend of mine just finished her masters thesis and she is a mixed race black/Asian queer woman and she was writing about feminism in SE Asia and she would rant to me all the time about how impossible it was to find “respected” sources on feminism that weren’t White Feminists, and it killed me that her work wasn’t going to be taken seriously as an avenue to open new conversations. My favorite professor in my program always talked me down from my freak outs by saying it wasn’t my job to Solve Literature. It’s an academic’s job to ask questions and maybe start to open new paths, not expand on the well-trodden ways. Too bad she’s a minority view at a state university known for its football team and not its lit program. ANYWAY. DISCOURSE, AMIRITE?