Etiquette?

[galadhir]

Is it okay to just slide into a complete stranger's DW over here and comment on their latest post as if you've known them for years? Or would a "hello, I hope you don't mind that I subscribed to you, I saw that we shared an interest in [whatever]" need to come first?

Comments

[duskpeterson]

My fandom is originalfic. :) Which has often made it difficult to track fic. Back in the 00s, there were some communities devoted to originalfic, at LJ and elsewhere. But they all seem to have died. The Slash Pile at Tumblr is still stumbling along, but last I checked, it was mainly webcomic recs.

I tried Wattpad, but the quality of noise to good fic was just too high. So I keep my eye on the Original Work tag at AO3, but I really miss the conversations that we originalfic writers and readers used to have.

[galadhir]

Oh nice! Well, I left LJ after turning some of my fanfic into original fic and getting published with it :) After which I spent 10 years writing original m/m romance. And I'm still writing original fic now, although it's SF/F and some of it I'm writing as a ghostwriter for someone else. So I would love to chat about the perils of original fic writing, as that's where I am now :)

(And yes, I tried Wattpad too, but as you say. They encourage a style of writing I don't enjoy.)

[duskpeterson]

(Happily does a quick web search.) Yup, I thought so - we were hanging out at LJ during the same time period. And since you say in the 2006 thread I found that you were writing m/m romance then, we were also hanging out in the m/m romance community during that same time period. Betcha our paths crossed. :)

This is just icing on the cake; I'd already started to sense we'd get along well. Would you care to move this conversation to email?

http://duskpeterson.com/#contact

[galadhir]

Ooh, thanks for the link! Your retrospective of the m/m romance scene looks fascinating! I wrote something similar myself in my Things Unseen: A Book of Queer Christian Witness because the whole writing slash fic and then writing m/m romance was a big part of both my realization that I was not straight and my wrestling with my religion. I'm definitely going to check out Pixel-Stained and see how you experienced the whole thing :)

I suppose it does make sense to take the chat off the public record! Part of the reason why I reverted to a fannish DW under a pseud was because blogging under my pen name felt so much like a public performance I ended up censoring myself into silence. I'll go and send you a short hello rn.

[duskpeterson]

Got your email and will reply to it! I thought I should say here, though, about Pixel-Stained: I should warn you that that volume is only about my first six months in the slash community.

[galadhir]

No problem! It's odd to be looking back on those days in retrospectives, but it's surprising how different the world is now than it was when I started writing slash. And how different I am! I thought I was straight at that point :)