copperbadge:

ovaaaaaaaan:

earlgreytea68:

cricketcat9:

codenamecesare:

telesilla:

lavvyan:

bonehandledknife:

“Well the Secret World Chronicle series started out as fanfic within an RP community playing the City of Heroes MMORPG. Then we took the same basic characters and put them in their own entirely different universe.” – Mercedes R. Lackey

Source: http://qr.ae/TU1mZn

This is SUCH bullshit though. 

The basic sentiment is lovely (”Go, ye little writers!”), but the notion that no published writer is still writing fic is so clueless it’s laughable. 

Fandom is full of published authors. And even if a writer hasn’t gone pro, don’t even try to tell me that means they can’t have Olympics-level writing skills. 

A lot of fan fiction is so toe-curlingly good, it makes whole heaps of published works (especially of the “she boobily breasted down the stairs” variety) look like a preschooler’s first attempt at storytelling. 

Fanfic can be amateur, yes. It can also be the best fucking thing you’ve ever read in your entire life, and if you haven’t noticed that, please don’t talk about it like you’ve any clue about the matter. 

Wow, could she be more condescending?

‘I published a series that started as City of Heroes fanfic. Fanfic is never going to be good, because any good fanfic writers move on to publishable work. I see no contradiction in these two statements.’

OMG! WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK!!! I can make a list of excellent, outstanding, incredibly talented and creative fanfic writers a mile long, and I’m really only in two fandoms (OK, three, if you count “Sherlock”). I pretty much stopped reading published fiction, because – SO DISAPPOINTING. Could count published books I liked in the last two years on my fingers. One hand only. So here it is, the truth about published writers. BTW, I read A LOT since I’ve learned how at the age of 6, it’s not like I’ve read five books altogether and I did not like four. Oh, and one of the published books was so damn bad that I wanted to throw my e-reader across the room (Yuri Plisetsky moment). They made a movie, also damn bad. UGH. Seriously, there are writers of fanfic who are Adam Rippon NOW. Some are even Yuzuru Hanyu. So, there. . 

OH MY GOD MERCEDES LACKEY GOES ON MY LIST

(I have a list of all writers who say annoying things like this about fanfiction. I don’t read any of the writers on that list.)

I’m pretty sure @copperbadge is the adam rippon of fanfic, if we’re gonna make that comparison. (although if we are making that comparison, I would actually go so far as to call him the yuzuru hanyu of fanfic.) his original stuff is fantastic, but his fic library is so much more extensive, to the point that I’m not sure it’s possible to be in fandom and not have read or at least been recommended something he’s written. I can think of two that went viral, even, just off the top of my head.

I wonder what her opinion of licensed novels is, since they’re, y’know, literally fanfic that somebody got paid to write. are they good? fun? neither? both? I mean, in my experience neither, but then it’s almost as if ideas like “good” and “fun” are subjective.

Aw, thank you! Yeah, I do find original fiction takes much longer and in some ways is less fulfilling; I love writing fanfic for fun. And most of my original fiction isn’t pro-published, though that’s a choice I made consciously. 

 To claim that only amateurs and beginners write fanfic is…..

Well, I don’t know much about Mercedes Lackey. I know who she is, of course, but I haven’t read her work. That said, I have a hard time being genuinely mad at her because honestly, people who only write commercial fiction don’t get into fandom spaces in any kind of authentic way very often. There are a few notable exceptions, but they tend to prove the rule. In some ways (at conventions, etc) content creators literally can’t engage in the way a fan could because they’re too visible, and in some ways (online discourse, fanfic) it’s difficult for them to do so because it can open them up to legal problems. And this is especially true of more senior writers in genre. 

It’s likely she has encountered a small sliver of fanfic, if she’s actually encountered any at all in the last twenty years; if she hasn’t read any fanfic of her own work, then she’s probably only seen those deeply uncomfortable chat pieces where obnoxious television hosts make actors read bad fanfic about themselves. So I would guess that she is coming at the entire question from a position of, pretty much, ignorance. 

I mean, when you come from a place of ignorance obviously you should keep your mouth shut, but we are conditioned to try and offer a complete answer when asked a question. And also sometimes we don’t know just how ignorant we are. “What do you think of fanfic” is honestly a bad question to ask someone who isn’t deeply engaged with fandom because they don’t have an accurate definition of “fanfic”. 

All that said, I think it would have been possible to stop at “I like it; have fun, kids,” without “but they’re not good writers” which really heavily implies “but they’re not real writers.” I think that probably comes from a deep well of creative insecurity many writers have, that someone might be better at their stories than they are.