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I'm Not Gonna Tell You How to Find It, Don't Even Ask
December 27th, 2022
Mylles Therese Jeffery
Yeah, I know. It’s been a while. No, I’m not dead. Yes, I still run this blog. Or I’m trying to.
It’s been a hell of a year for me. In no particular order I moved halfway across the country, saw Aly & AJ in concert, lived in a hammock in my parents’ rec room for a month, survived “the vacuum incident”, got a new job working graves, dyed my hair blue, and just to really drive it home, moved myself and all my shit halfway across the country.
Oh, also I’ve been writing. Obviously not for this blog, but I’ve been writing.
“What have you been writing if not posts for this blog that you promised to update regularly?”
Well… fanfiction.
Yes, that’s right. Fanfiction.
My first real exposure to fanfiction was probably in 2011. I was a sophomore in High School and had also just moved halfway across the country. Before I moved though I had watched the entirety of Star Trek: Voyager two times through and dragged one of my best friends into the obsession with me. The whole show was excellent, but my favorite part was the romance between Lt. Tom Paris and Chief Engineer B’Elanna Torres. And in my humble opinion there wasn’t enough of it. So, off to fanfiction.net I went!
After that every few years a new hyperfixation would present itself and would send me into the arms of fanfiction seeking new content. In 2015 it was the Scully & Mulder. In 2017 it was Veronica & Logan. In 2018 it was Chuck & Blair. Each time it was a brief affair, lasting a couple months at most, fueled most likely by the lovely cocktail of ADHD’s gift of hyperfocus and mania’s enthusiasm and longevity. But after a little while the obsession would taper off to a reasonable level, and I’d be able to read “real” literature again. I’d watch new shows and new movies and find something else to pour everything into.
The vice grip these two had on me...
Then She-Ra happened.
I watched She-Ra and the Princesses of Power in June 2020. Since then I have coerced almost 30 different people into watching it in its entirety, rewatched it myself more times than I can count, spent all the money on fanart, t-shirts, and enamel pins, and read thousands of fanfictions. Thousands.
I started reading She-Ra fanfic in July of 2020 and I haven’t stopped. What should’ve been a short dalliance has become the longest and most fulfilling relationship I’ve ever had. Every night it is AO3, a very popular fanfiction website, who I curl up with in bed, and every morning it is emails of fics being updated that I wake up to.
When I first started reading She-Ra fic, it was the height of publication. The show had just ended, the most popular “ship” (a fandom word for relationship, particularly romantic) had just become canon, and everyone was flying pride flags everywhere. Even better, the show’s creator, ND Stevenson, had confessed on a Black Lives matter stream that he did with his wife that he himself had written a “fanfiction” and posted it to AO3 under a pseudonym. It didn’t take long for the fandom to find it and we were rabid.
That fic was what got me onto AO3 in the first place, and I just never left.
Back then we were getting what felt like 20+ fics a day, and you could find us all over tumblr. Things have gotten a little quieter since then, as they do when you go two and a half years without new canon content, but there is still great fic being written and posted every day.
And about a year ago I thought maybe I could take part in that.
In March of 2021, we celebrated my good friend Ian’s birthday. In this particular group of friends on birthdays we do something called a Roast & Toast. Basically, you go around in a circle and everyone “roasts,” or straight up insults the birthday boy, and then toasts them, to soften the blow. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that some of these roasts have haunted me for years, but it’s pretty fun to force your friends to tell you how great you are.
Well for Ian’s roast I recounted the story of years before when Ian showed me an AMV on YouTube. (An AMV is short for animated music video and it’s basically when someone takes clips from a movie or tv show and compiles them together to make a music video) It was a slash AMV (slash basically means a queer ship, and damn this post is terminology heavy…) for the characters of Rapunzel from Tangled and Mavis from Hotel Transylvania set to the song “The River” by Yiruma.
Ian thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
Ian’s not a dick, and he’s not the type to make fun of people. So, I said to him “You know this is serious, right?”
And at first he didn’t believe me.
It took a minute but eventually I convinced him that whoever created that video was full of total sincerity, genuinely shipping Mavis and Rapunzel, which he thought was absurd already because they weren’t even in the same piece of media, and likely spent hours compiling that video, not for the joke, but as a labor of love.
“I know these people Ian, they mean it.”
On Ian’s birthday my roast was, “You’re oblivious – I had to tell you that was real.”
To which Ian said, “How do people feel that deeply?”
Later that night I confessed my egregious sins, my avid fanfiction reading, to my friends. I was particularly feral about the fic I was reading at the time – a While You Were Sleeping AU (AU stands for Alternate Universe). Then my friend Hales said this.
“It’s funny, ‘cause like you aren’t writing the fanfiction, just like you didn’t make the video, but you’re like adjacent to it. You know all about it!”
Well, Hales, friends, I am adjacent no longer.
I have written two complete works on AO3 and I’m two-thirds of the way through another. One of those pieces is over 100,000 words and has over a thousand kudos (the AO3 version of a “like”). According to the comments it has been re-read by several and made dozens cry. I finished writing it in June and every few days it will get a new comment or kudos.
As a writer it may very well be my legacy.
Ironically, for what is basically copyright infringement, it is the most original piece of fiction I have ever written.
I write realistic fiction. I write about normal, kinda deeply flawed people, doing pretty mundane things in the places I grew up while falling in love. Or I write essays about my turbulent emotions and blog posts about media’s convergence with my life. But this particular fanfic? It’s science fiction/fantasy. It’s the length of an epic. It’s an adventure.
But it’s still everything I do best – it’s angsty. It’s dialogue heavy. It’s an analysis of character flaws and growth. And of course, it’s a love story.
I’m really, really proud of it.
The object of my obsession - Catradora by the lovely Kate Farr
But, despite the fact that I’ve written a popular piece of serialized fiction that hundreds have subscribed to, hundreds have commented on and over a thousand read, despite the fact that it has thematic depth and emotional weight and despite the fact that it was written with passion and drive… it will never be taken seriously. It doesn’t matter that dozens have told me it's one of their favorite works of all time. It doesn’t matter that I pushed myself as a writer and worked my sorry little ass off. It will take me nowhere.
I applied for a job back in August that centered around writing. I knew I would never get it. I was not entirely qualified, but I hoped that by throwing my hat in the ring I would open metaphorical doors. Instead, I was never contacted, not even to be told that they weren’t interested. I have contacted two different agents in the past year about getting a novel that I wrote during the pandemic published. Neither of these agents ever sent me so much as a rejection letter.
Even Target had the decency to do that.
And I could’ve sent out more query letters. I could’ve looked for more jobs. But at what point am I supposed to throw in the towel? When the magazines I submitted to all told me no? When I did get a rejection letter from those other two agents? When I realized I didn’t have the education to qualify me for any job in the writing industry, and at this rate never will?
I can’t make any headway in this industry. I’ve written three novels but none of them are published. I have this blog but it doesn’t do nearly the foot traffic necessary to put me on the radar. I have my fanfiction, but that isn’t “real writing”.
Bullshit.
The taboo around fanfiction has been there for a long time. As long as it’s existed on the internet at least - as long as it’s been easily accessible. But fanfiction has always existed.
Fanfiction is defined as “fiction written by a fan featuring characters from a particular TV series, movie, book, etc.”
Lots of things are written by fans featuring other creators’ characters.
Paradise Lost is Bible fanfiction.
Pride & Prejudice & Zombies is a Zombie Apocalypse AU.
West Side Story is a 1950’s AU of Romeo & Juliet.
Rogue One is a Missing Scenes Fic.
And my beloved She-Ra and the Princesses of Power? The studio calls it a remake. Really, it’s just a Canon-Divergence AU.
Fanfiction is everywhere, and you love it. Except when it’s called fanfiction.
But… even I can admit you have your reasons.
Fifty Shades of Grey is a 2011 erotic romance novel that was originally published online as a No-Powers, Modern AU, BDSM, Twilight fanfic. And it was wildly popular. So popular the writer took it off the internet and managed to publish it traditionally. This has actually been done a couple of times now by a couple of different writers. They change a few details – locations, character names – and they’re able to sell a work free of copyright infringement.
There is a lot of discourse in the fandom community about the ethics of this, but there is one truth that needs to be acknowledged – fanfiction might very well be dead if not for the inaction of one Stephenie Meyer.
Stephenie Meyer published the first Twilight novel in 2005, so in the world of literature, its copyright does not expire until 2105. Until then its characters are not public domain. They cannot be monetized without an express sale of rights.
So, if Christian Grey was Edward Cullen…
Meyer could’ve sued, and she probably would’ve won. There’s no way of knowing what the repercussions of that would’ve been in the fandom community. In some scenarios, depending on the recourse of action and arguments about notoriety garnered through copyrighted material, the creation of fanfic at all could’ve become illegal.
But it didn’t.
Instead, it shed a light on an activity that before had been seldom spoken of aloud and it liberated it.
It also condemned it.
Fifty Shades of Grey is not… the best book. It centers around a toxic relationship that, arguably improves, but suffers from a gross discrepancy in power and communication – incredibly dangerous considering the BDSM element. The movie is better, I watched a video essay about it once, but the book also suffers from poor writing and a sloppy plot. Still, E.L. James became a millionaire selling books.
As my friend Res says, “Engagement does not always reflect quality.”
Because of its reputation, and its very well-known origin story, the entire genre of fanfiction was stained.
Since Grey, and possibly even before, fanfiction has been considered the ugly stepchild of writing. It’s unoriginal. It’s poorly written. It’s self-indulgent and tropey. And the fanfiction that manages to get itself published traditionally is soapy, melodramatic, and clunky.
Bullshit.
But it will get me nowhere.
So why am I writing it?
Hales likes to remind me time and time again that these are my ten-thousand hours. Malcolm Gladwell said that to become an expert at anything you have to do it, and do it right, for ten-thousand hours. Well, I’ve definitely put in a lot of hours, and I think I’ve been doing it right.
But that’s not why I’m writing it.
I think… I think I’m writing fanfiction because I want to. And because I love it.
Which makes sense, because fanfiction is the genre of love.
I have never written anything with more sincere and pure intent than my fanfics. My current fic, by comparison to my last, is bombing. It has less than a third the kudos, gets half as many comments a chapter, and some of those comments are negative. Which is just… like almost unheard of. But I keep writing it. I have the next chapter ready to be posted and I’m working on the one after that.
I’m not writing it for praise, or to publish in a traditional sense, but because I have a story that I want to share. And I love that story.
Fanfiction is singular in that your characters have already been given personalities, quirks and demons and it is your job as the writer to honor them rather than create them. You have been given the cornerstone of any great story, great characters, and the freedom to play with them in your own little sandbox world. Canon is yours to pick and choose from, reality yours to draw and color, and circumstance yours to craft.
The only thing, truly the only thing consistent from one fanfic to the next, is the subject matter.
And that’s love.
Familial, platonic, romantic, almost all fanfic boils down to being about relationships. It’s how most of us search for fics to read on the most popular sites, by searching the relationships we want to read about.
Fanfiction is a labor of love about love, and as such it is the breeding ground for some of the most sincere and heartfelt art I have ever been witness to in my life.
And now I write fanfiction. And in an industry that, more than ever, is driven by “sellability” it will get me nowhere.
But I don’t care.
Because the other day my friends yelled at me in the chat for making them feel things.
Because I got a kudos on a year old fic last night.
Because I have learned and grown and practiced and refined.
Because I have written something beautiful and different. I have poured my soul and my nights into a piece, and I didn’t hold back.
And someday I’ll write something important. I’m more sure of that than ever now. Someday someone will see in my writing what last night’s kudos giver did. Someday someone will see the love I’ve put into my work and it will move them to something. Someday I will write myself a legacy.
Who knows, maybe I already have.
Mylles Therese Jeffery
a twenty-eight-year-old bisexual college drop out with bipolar disorder who likes to write and who will write something important someday
About Me
I’m a twenty-eight-year-old bisexual college dropout with bipolar disorder and I like to write. It’s kind of the only thing I’m good at. I’ve been writing novels and essays since I was ten years old and I’ve always wanted to write something important. I’ve read all the Twilight books upwards of ten times, think Kesha is one of the smartest songwriters of our generation, and write She-Ra Fanfiction in my spare time. I think I’m likable because three people voted me “Best Personality” in High School. I think I’m smart because I scored a 33 on the ACT 11 years ago. Most of my ego you will see, is fairly dated. But my favorite English teacher told me I was “the real deal” so… that’s something. I currently live in DeWitt, Michigan where I work as an General Office Assistant for the State Treasury. And occasionally write on a blog.
Contact ME
What do you want me to write about? I wanna know, so, like, send me a message.