Welcome to This Week in Fandom, the OTW’s roundup of things which are happening! Before we get started, did you see that Dragoncon goers were lucky enough to be given a preview of the upcoming Star Wars documentary series, ‘Looking for Leia’? The series should be released sometime in the next few months and Mary Sue journalist Kate Gardner, who was at the preview screening, tells us to expect ‘sweetness… earnestness’, and ‘stories… about women coming into their own fully through their own interests’. Sound good to you? Let us know in the comments!
Tag: Fanfiction
This Week in Fandom, Volume 120
Welcome to This Week in Fandom, the OTW’s roundup of things which are happening! Before we start, thanks to everyone for the congratulations on AO3’s Hugo win. There’s been more squee than we can keep up with. If you’d like to see some of the press coverage about the award, check out the Press Room on our website.
One of the big stories this week is the news that Marvel and Sony have decided to no longer collaborate on Spider Man movies. The story was broken by Deadline in this article last week. It’s kind of a complicated situation (Jeff Goldblum is confused about it), but it seems to be mostly about money. Read More
OTW Guest Post: OldToadWoman
From time to time, the OTW will be hosting guest posts on our OTW News accounts. These guests will be providing an outside perspective on the OTW or aspects of fandom where our projects may have a presence. The posts express each author’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. We welcome suggestions from fans for future guest posts, which can be left as a comment here or by contacting us directly.
OldToadWoman is a large ball of anxiety and weird ideas (and possibly toads) that resolves into a human shape and manages to type out fan fiction from time to time. Find her works on her Dreamwidth.
How did you first find out about fandom and fanworks?
I don’t know whether it was a teacher lecturing me on plagiarism or a classmate teasing me about making up silly stories based on a TV show, but I somehow knew I wasn’t allowed to write fanfiction before I even knew what fanfiction was.
I stumbled into science fiction fandom in college and it was just a magical encounter. You’re allowed to write stories and share them with other fans without having to worry about them not being “good enough” to publish, and it’s okay if they’re based on TV shows and movies that already exist? Yes, please!
Unfortunately, I was very short-sighted and jumped into fandom posting under my real name. I can’t really talk about my first fandom without basically doxxing myself. Even though I was submitting to zines under my real name, it never occurred to me that what I wrote back then would leak out beyond that small fandom and end up documented on the Internet forever* [stay tuned: There’s a happy ending to this one]. One woman in our fandom used a pseudonym and we all thought she was a bit pretentious and now I realize she was the only smart one. Of course, at the time I was writing pretty innocuous fluff. I had no idea that someday I’d be writing explicit fiction that my boss might not approve of.