A/N: Thanks to all readers and reviewers, especially: LifeofDracoandGinny, Grizel, eaudetoilettex, SomethingsWicked, and pitzi.
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Hey, all! Fans, casual readers, and people who stumbled across this thing when you were really trying to find the recipe for that three-ingredient Japanese cake… whoever you are, I’ll bet you never thought you’d see another chapter of this! Not that this concern is really misplaced, because I didn’t know if you would, either. O.o. First of all, the Hello Kitty-shaped drive that had this essay got mysteriously corrupted about a year ago. Nobody was ever able to find out what happened. No expert could make sense of it. Some of the files were just permanently… gone. OF COURSE, they were the most important ones (isn’t that what always happens, though??) Few events are more discouraging than losing the exact files you worked the hardest on. So that was a major setback.
But I think that an even bigger problem was the contents of the next chapter I’d been trying to write. It was a continued analysis of Ginny’s character and her part in the narrative, especially how Ginny should have been central to that narrative (and obviously wasn’t. :P) We had an entire book about Ginny (CoS), and then her character was diminished, squashed, and basically dropped by the end of the series. Aside from whether it was good or bad in terms of the overall story (hint: it was BAD), it was a very strange decision. I can’t remember ever seeing another one like it in a multibook series. When a character is given that much importance near the beginning, they don’t normally fade and disappear by the end. It just doesn’t make sense. But that’s what happened to Ginny. I think there are very specific reasons, and that they’re really the same reasons why the resolution of the book felt so unsatisfying in terms of both plot and pairings. And yes, that’s also why I was almost more unsatisfied with what had happened to Harry’s character than either Draco or Ginny’s.
So this is basically what’s coming up a couple of chapters from now.
HOWEVER… the writing in general kind of got stuck, and I was never really able to get back to it in any way that resulted in an actual next chapter of the essay. There are some other reasons why this happened, I think, and they’re related to my original writing. I won’t go into any of it right now, but the point is that I was stuck. Stuckness is not a fun place to be, let’s just say. Several different things have started to work together to change that. Many of them, again, are related to the original writing I’m working on right now… but not all of them.
There’s a metastory to why we write D/G (or really, why anyone writes in any fandom.) I think that for now, it’s more important to talk about why D/G became such a huge part of my writing in the first place. And I also want to know what other people think about this in terms of their own writing. I think that’s important before going on with the essay itself. Because the point is why the essay is worth writing in the first place, why we’re all here, what it is that still attracts us to D/G, to Draco, Ginny, the sum of their parts, and I would argue more than that sum. There’s not much point in making the points in the essay before analyzing why the essay is even being written in the first place!
So here it is, the Official Story of Anise’s Quest Through D/G (tm.)
Come with now on a flashback to the summer of 2002. I’d just been on an endless, quixotic quest to place four books (count em, four) with agents. These books will never see the light of day (if we’re all lucky. :P One was a kids’ book, The Summer Anise B. Leinen Drove Me Nuts. One was a YA book about teenaged sisters living through a difficult summer, The Secret Life of Girls. I think that was the only one that really had a narrative worth salvaging. But I would say now that when I wrote TSLoG, I simply didn’t have enough distance from the events which inspired it. I hadn’t moved far enough from being a teenager to really write convincingly about teenagers. Maybe it would be worth going back to rework someday, or… eh.
The third book was a bad historical romance set in 16th century England, Seize the Shining Day. Although I still think the historical work in that one was good; the story itself was the problem. And one… (hides face) really, really bad erotic fic, Lady of the Manor. Oh, it was bad. Just trust me on that.
Anyway, these books were all rejected by many fine agents and publishers. Ebooks were certainly around in 2002, but the era of Kindle self-publishing was still a few years in the future. There seemed to be no options. I sank into misery and decided that I was never ever going to write fiction again. But THEN…
It all began when my boyfriend at the time handed me a book.
Kevin: You should read this.
Me: (scoffingly) Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone…Isn’t that a children’s book?
Kevin: You should read it.
Me: (scornfully) It’s too popular to be good.
Kevin: (smiling, still holding out the book)
Me: (snippily) Oh, okay. (taking book.)
And that’s where it all started. O.o.
I was hooked, which is probably what happened to pretty much everyone else reading this. I wasn’t even completely sure why, and in a way, I’m still not, but there’s no doubt about the fact that it happened. I finished GoF and then had the sinking realization that there were only four books.
If the next event hadn’t happened, who knows if there ever would have been a single Anisefic, but… it did. A friend sent me a link to a horrible LoTR fanfic and said, in essence, “You have to read this. It’s the worst thing ever written.” This statement wouldn’t have led everyone to go to FFN and read the fic, but I have great appreciation for truly, truly bad writing that doesn’t realize how bad it actually is. (I’m a longtime MSTie, which kind of says it all.;)
My friend hadn’t exaggerated. I could scrub my brain with bleach twenty four hours a day and still never really get that fic out of my head. (I’m sure it’s still there, somewhere in the depths of the dregs of FFN. An authorial self-insertion, Legolas on a white horse scooping her up in the woods, enough SPAG errors to make the English language whimper, lie down, and die… you get the idea, right?)
But…. I was fascinated by the entire concept of One Big Fanfic Archive. (Kind of like John Reed and the Industrial Workers of the World…) You see, fanfic has an incredibly long pedigree. I actually have a classic mimeographed copy of LotR fic from 1974 that once belonged to my mother. The earliest modern fandom (Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes) has been going on so long that the earliest fanfic is itself out of copyright. Fanfic far predates the net, PC’s, computers themselves, movable type, and, in fact, the dawn of written language. There’s an ENTIRE chapter based on this concept coming up later in the essay, but the point here is that there’s never before been a way to collect all fanfics and fandoms together in one place in a way that is accessible to a good chunk of the planet. I have a lot of issues with FFN, believe me, but as a creative concept, it’s incredibly exciting.
And a thought dawned...
If there’s LotR fanfic, then there has to also be fanfic for these Harry Potter books.
Hmm. What if I looked for it…
(types)
YAY! It exists! Um, more than exists. It’s EVERYWHERE. Look how much of it there is!
And… it kind of all went from there.
This was basically a time when the earliest HP fandom era was ending and the intermediate one was still to come. FFN existed; so did Fictionalley, and I’m sure there were other sites, but those were the only two I knew of. The first wave of big-name fans were at or even slightly past their original peak; you could still read about the Big Three fanfic writers (I can’t remember who they were anymore, though.) It was before the entire Cassandra Claire plagiarism mess, before the weird situation where Msscribe impersonated a Christian model who was supposedly harassing her, and even before the very first fandom conference. (That happened in summer 2003, and we’ll be getting to it eventually.)
At first, I was only looking for HP fics in general, kind of reading what I found or what was recommended to me and getting to know more about the fandom. I figured out pretty quickly that the writing tended to be centered around relationships, and little by little, I felt that some pairings made for better writing than others. There was a lot of great slash writing out there (still is,) but the main pairing was Draco/Harry, of course, and I never felt that it was a believable relationship. This meant that the plots, character development, and situations stemming from this pairing never felt to me like they really worked as well as they could have.
If the writing centers around a pairing and that pairing itself isn’t really believable in terms of the characters, then there’s going to be a hollow feeling at the center, which is something I still very much believe. Even the best D/H fics tended to have this flaw. I did actually read several H/G and D/Hr fics in this Early Fanfic Era, and that’s why I was never able to get too excited about any of them. But then the search started narrowing to a particular pairing—which was D/G, as you might have already guessed, dear reader. ;) From then on, I was pretty much hooked.
The first D/G fic I remember was All You Need Is Love, which I think was a collaboration between two authors. I actually printed it out to read, but it was thrown out during a move, and I never found it again. After all that time, no guarantees are made as to the accuracy of this re-creation, but… I think the plot involved Draco and Ginny being kidnapped by Voldemort and sent back in time. (??) I definitely remember that the last chapter involved Ginny splashing around in a pool, and implied D/G action that was about to take place right after the end. After that, I definitely remember Bride of Slytherin and Beauty on the Fire. Rising From Ashes was another early D/G fic, although as we know, the promised sequel never materialized. :P
And suddenly… without warning… my writing came back.
There is no way to describe what it meant. A new me emerged, a me that had been submerged for a long time, one that was creative, strong, and happy. I carried notebooks and wrote constantly; there was more than one night when I wrote almost until the sun came up. I reconnected with an important self, and all because of D/G. That’s why I owe so much to this fandom.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the first long fic I worked on was any good. It wasn’t… believe me, it wasn’t. That’s why it has never seen the light of day. :P I think I included half of one chapter in Snips and Snails and Draco Tales, and that’s all that anybody should probably ever read from that fic. Although I will say this… Ginny secretly gave Harry a love potion as a huge plot point, which is why I’m still convinced that I’m psychic. HBP was still a couple of years in the future. However, Dumbledore then sent Draco and Ginny to the Mall of America, and... that’s all you need to know. (Why? Um, it seemed to make sense at the time…) Suffice it to say, there were some issues.
But what mattered much more than anything else as that this fic was a way to start writing again, when I’d really started to think that I never would. I can honestly say that the D/G ship brought the Writing Me back to life.
In the next chapter… Jewel of the Harem, the story of the first HP conference in Orlando, the founding of FIA, and so much more! Also, a grad student from India is writing about the D/G fandom for a media studies project, and you… yes, YOU… can help and contribute. I'll tell you exactly how and why. :) More tomorrow!
+++
Hey, all! Fans, casual readers, and people who stumbled across this thing when you were really trying to find the recipe for that three-ingredient Japanese cake… whoever you are, I’ll bet you never thought you’d see another chapter of this! Not that this concern is really misplaced, because I didn’t know if you would, either. O.o. First of all, the Hello Kitty-shaped drive that had this essay got mysteriously corrupted about a year ago. Nobody was ever able to find out what happened. No expert could make sense of it. Some of the files were just permanently… gone. OF COURSE, they were the most important ones (isn’t that what always happens, though??) Few events are more discouraging than losing the exact files you worked the hardest on. So that was a major setback.
But I think that an even bigger problem was the contents of the next chapter I’d been trying to write. It was a continued analysis of Ginny’s character and her part in the narrative, especially how Ginny should have been central to that narrative (and obviously wasn’t. :P) We had an entire book about Ginny (CoS), and then her character was diminished, squashed, and basically dropped by the end of the series. Aside from whether it was good or bad in terms of the overall story (hint: it was BAD), it was a very strange decision. I can’t remember ever seeing another one like it in a multibook series. When a character is given that much importance near the beginning, they don’t normally fade and disappear by the end. It just doesn’t make sense. But that’s what happened to Ginny. I think there are very specific reasons, and that they’re really the same reasons why the resolution of the book felt so unsatisfying in terms of both plot and pairings. And yes, that’s also why I was almost more unsatisfied with what had happened to Harry’s character than either Draco or Ginny’s.
So this is basically what’s coming up a couple of chapters from now.
HOWEVER… the writing in general kind of got stuck, and I was never really able to get back to it in any way that resulted in an actual next chapter of the essay. There are some other reasons why this happened, I think, and they’re related to my original writing. I won’t go into any of it right now, but the point is that I was stuck. Stuckness is not a fun place to be, let’s just say. Several different things have started to work together to change that. Many of them, again, are related to the original writing I’m working on right now… but not all of them.
There’s a metastory to why we write D/G (or really, why anyone writes in any fandom.) I think that for now, it’s more important to talk about why D/G became such a huge part of my writing in the first place. And I also want to know what other people think about this in terms of their own writing. I think that’s important before going on with the essay itself. Because the point is why the essay is worth writing in the first place, why we’re all here, what it is that still attracts us to D/G, to Draco, Ginny, the sum of their parts, and I would argue more than that sum. There’s not much point in making the points in the essay before analyzing why the essay is even being written in the first place!
So here it is, the Official Story of Anise’s Quest Through D/G (tm.)
Come with now on a flashback to the summer of 2002. I’d just been on an endless, quixotic quest to place four books (count em, four) with agents. These books will never see the light of day (if we’re all lucky. :P One was a kids’ book, The Summer Anise B. Leinen Drove Me Nuts. One was a YA book about teenaged sisters living through a difficult summer, The Secret Life of Girls. I think that was the only one that really had a narrative worth salvaging. But I would say now that when I wrote TSLoG, I simply didn’t have enough distance from the events which inspired it. I hadn’t moved far enough from being a teenager to really write convincingly about teenagers. Maybe it would be worth going back to rework someday, or… eh.
The third book was a bad historical romance set in 16th century England, Seize the Shining Day. Although I still think the historical work in that one was good; the story itself was the problem. And one… (hides face) really, really bad erotic fic, Lady of the Manor. Oh, it was bad. Just trust me on that.
Anyway, these books were all rejected by many fine agents and publishers. Ebooks were certainly around in 2002, but the era of Kindle self-publishing was still a few years in the future. There seemed to be no options. I sank into misery and decided that I was never ever going to write fiction again. But THEN…
It all began when my boyfriend at the time handed me a book.
Kevin: You should read this.
Me: (scoffingly) Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone…Isn’t that a children’s book?
Kevin: You should read it.
Me: (scornfully) It’s too popular to be good.
Kevin: (smiling, still holding out the book)
Me: (snippily) Oh, okay. (taking book.)
And that’s where it all started. O.o.
I was hooked, which is probably what happened to pretty much everyone else reading this. I wasn’t even completely sure why, and in a way, I’m still not, but there’s no doubt about the fact that it happened. I finished GoF and then had the sinking realization that there were only four books.
If the next event hadn’t happened, who knows if there ever would have been a single Anisefic, but… it did. A friend sent me a link to a horrible LoTR fanfic and said, in essence, “You have to read this. It’s the worst thing ever written.” This statement wouldn’t have led everyone to go to FFN and read the fic, but I have great appreciation for truly, truly bad writing that doesn’t realize how bad it actually is. (I’m a longtime MSTie, which kind of says it all.;)
My friend hadn’t exaggerated. I could scrub my brain with bleach twenty four hours a day and still never really get that fic out of my head. (I’m sure it’s still there, somewhere in the depths of the dregs of FFN. An authorial self-insertion, Legolas on a white horse scooping her up in the woods, enough SPAG errors to make the English language whimper, lie down, and die… you get the idea, right?)
But…. I was fascinated by the entire concept of One Big Fanfic Archive. (Kind of like John Reed and the Industrial Workers of the World…) You see, fanfic has an incredibly long pedigree. I actually have a classic mimeographed copy of LotR fic from 1974 that once belonged to my mother. The earliest modern fandom (Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes) has been going on so long that the earliest fanfic is itself out of copyright. Fanfic far predates the net, PC’s, computers themselves, movable type, and, in fact, the dawn of written language. There’s an ENTIRE chapter based on this concept coming up later in the essay, but the point here is that there’s never before been a way to collect all fanfics and fandoms together in one place in a way that is accessible to a good chunk of the planet. I have a lot of issues with FFN, believe me, but as a creative concept, it’s incredibly exciting.
And a thought dawned...
If there’s LotR fanfic, then there has to also be fanfic for these Harry Potter books.
Hmm. What if I looked for it…
(types)
YAY! It exists! Um, more than exists. It’s EVERYWHERE. Look how much of it there is!
And… it kind of all went from there.
This was basically a time when the earliest HP fandom era was ending and the intermediate one was still to come. FFN existed; so did Fictionalley, and I’m sure there were other sites, but those were the only two I knew of. The first wave of big-name fans were at or even slightly past their original peak; you could still read about the Big Three fanfic writers (I can’t remember who they were anymore, though.) It was before the entire Cassandra Claire plagiarism mess, before the weird situation where Msscribe impersonated a Christian model who was supposedly harassing her, and even before the very first fandom conference. (That happened in summer 2003, and we’ll be getting to it eventually.)
At first, I was only looking for HP fics in general, kind of reading what I found or what was recommended to me and getting to know more about the fandom. I figured out pretty quickly that the writing tended to be centered around relationships, and little by little, I felt that some pairings made for better writing than others. There was a lot of great slash writing out there (still is,) but the main pairing was Draco/Harry, of course, and I never felt that it was a believable relationship. This meant that the plots, character development, and situations stemming from this pairing never felt to me like they really worked as well as they could have.
If the writing centers around a pairing and that pairing itself isn’t really believable in terms of the characters, then there’s going to be a hollow feeling at the center, which is something I still very much believe. Even the best D/H fics tended to have this flaw. I did actually read several H/G and D/Hr fics in this Early Fanfic Era, and that’s why I was never able to get too excited about any of them. But then the search started narrowing to a particular pairing—which was D/G, as you might have already guessed, dear reader. ;) From then on, I was pretty much hooked.
The first D/G fic I remember was All You Need Is Love, which I think was a collaboration between two authors. I actually printed it out to read, but it was thrown out during a move, and I never found it again. After all that time, no guarantees are made as to the accuracy of this re-creation, but… I think the plot involved Draco and Ginny being kidnapped by Voldemort and sent back in time. (??) I definitely remember that the last chapter involved Ginny splashing around in a pool, and implied D/G action that was about to take place right after the end. After that, I definitely remember Bride of Slytherin and Beauty on the Fire. Rising From Ashes was another early D/G fic, although as we know, the promised sequel never materialized. :P
And suddenly… without warning… my writing came back.
There is no way to describe what it meant. A new me emerged, a me that had been submerged for a long time, one that was creative, strong, and happy. I carried notebooks and wrote constantly; there was more than one night when I wrote almost until the sun came up. I reconnected with an important self, and all because of D/G. That’s why I owe so much to this fandom.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the first long fic I worked on was any good. It wasn’t… believe me, it wasn’t. That’s why it has never seen the light of day. :P I think I included half of one chapter in Snips and Snails and Draco Tales, and that’s all that anybody should probably ever read from that fic. Although I will say this… Ginny secretly gave Harry a love potion as a huge plot point, which is why I’m still convinced that I’m psychic. HBP was still a couple of years in the future. However, Dumbledore then sent Draco and Ginny to the Mall of America, and... that’s all you need to know. (Why? Um, it seemed to make sense at the time…) Suffice it to say, there were some issues.
But what mattered much more than anything else as that this fic was a way to start writing again, when I’d really started to think that I never would. I can honestly say that the D/G ship brought the Writing Me back to life.
In the next chapter… Jewel of the Harem, the story of the first HP conference in Orlando, the founding of FIA, and so much more! Also, a grad student from India is writing about the D/G fandom for a media studies project, and you… yes, YOU… can help and contribute. I'll tell you exactly how and why. :) More tomorrow!
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