mine's a tale that can't be told.

When I was looking through the ridiculous number of stories I have started for all kinds of different fandoms to do the last WIP meme, it got me thinking a lot about ways I could put more effort into trying to get more things finished. The amount of work I posted all last year doesn't reflect well at all how much I actually worked on writing because I start so much that I end up deciding to go back to later, and I'm considering for the first time how my sort of unique habits of switching from fandom to fandom are the essential problem.

I've observed a lot before that I seem to have slightly unusual tendencies when it comes to my participation in different fandoms. A lot of people seem able to stay more or less consistently involved in the same one or even the same specific ship pretty much all the time. They'll keep reading and possibly writing the same kind of fanfic as part of their everyday past-times for many months or even a few years. They may usually be involved in several different fandoms at the same time with generally equal interest in all of them maintained. I see fans like this write entries sometimes saying things like "I can't seem to be as interested in Brian/Justin lately. I don't know if the fandom has been lacking good fic or if I'm just not in the mood, but I'm so bored with everything." And personally, this is the kind of thing I see and just think, Well duh, you just need a break from it because it's natural to me that I won't always be as invested in HP as I am at my heights of obsession and creativity in that fandom, but I know that's because I just work a little differently and have other expectations of myself for keeping up with and being productive in a certain fandom.

I've learned by now that my ways of drifting slightly in and out of fandoms this easily and always being heavily into just one thing at a time is not at all ideal for making many friends through them or establishing myself as a well-known writer. There are only a couple fandoms that I've been active in so much through the last few years, even if it's still been an on-and-off thing, that I've actually stayed in touch with the same people I've made friends with in them the whole time and don't feel like an unknown stranger in the comms. Though it can make me feel kind of left out at times being more of a wanderer than a permanent fixture, I've just accepted by now that it's usually going to be like that, and at least I can tell myself that's why in five years of writing pretty well-received fanfic on LJ I've never quite come close to any kind of BNF status. (Of course, there are quite enough reasons to be glad I'll never be the kind of fic writer whose name and reputation precedes their actual work and its merit and who has more fan friends than honest critics, because nothing would prevent improvement more than an illusion of some kind of already-reached important success which I think we've all seen cause inflated egos in some writers...but that's an entirely different subject for another time, lol.)

( I told you the content of this journal was going to get a bit different... )