Blogs

Blogs - the wonderful text input through HTML pages that allow people that either are feeling over self-important or woefully impotent get to express themselves and make themselves feel useful and, if someone reads their blog, important to others.

I don't know if that would apply necessarily to all blog users. The ones that write about their personal, day-to-day lives it most certainly would - nobody cares that you had three pieces of toast, but only two had your favorite raspberry jam on it because you ran out with a glass of milk. The ones that write out their thoughts on a subject, on the other hand, tend to have a little bit better reason to write - to express a viewpoint on an important subject matter that may not have been explored in such a fashion, or to get feedback on a to-be-published-in-the-future literary work.

It sure feels like I am justifying the reason I am writing, doesn't it, beyond the scope of trying to make myself feel important to others, like my opinion or thoughts matter? I don't care, truly, if anyone else reads my blog - I just like having a place to record my thoughts that has more data redundancy than I can do myself - internet archiving.

The Charm of Fan Fiction

Over the past several years, fan fiction (of the Harry Potter variety, in particular) has captivated my interest intensely - so much so that I have written portions of fan fiction stories. It is unfortunate that so many authors forbid their world or worlds from being used for fan fiction as it would increase reader numbers, as some seem to only lurk in the fan fiction world until they find a story that they enjoy, in which case they, then, read the "canon" book or books that have to do with that story.

Another positive with the fan fiction are"spin-offs" or what they did with the Star Wars and Star Trek universes - multiple authors filling in the timelines, which give both the characters in the world and the places in the world more history, more richness and attachment to the original characters of the original authors (not to mention the massive amount in royalties they could collect).

Fan fiction, I have found, is a wonder inspiration as it both gives ideas (to an extent), and gives motivation - some fan fiction stories are awful but the authors still courageously post them, making you feel less concerned about people flaming you about the quality of your work, both when putting up the work on a fan fiction site (or something similar) as well as sending your work into a publisher or editor.

Fan fiction is also a wonderful device to get passed a writer's block as the world and characters have been pre-developed for you, so all you need to do is give them a bit of direction and dialogue without having to fill in the rest. Potentially, you can even substitute your world in for the fan fiction world and characters while keeping that same plot, easing portion of your work, or at least making your work more incremental while still keeping a fair amount of relevent feedback/criticism at a lower cost of resources (time in particular) used.

All hail fan fiction!