supplemental blog entry on slash fiction

Okay, so I waited a day before posting my reflective comments on writing my story. First of all, I did not attempt to post it to a fan fiction site. Why? Because I didn't feel comfortable doing that. For one thing, despite reading a few stories, I didn't feel comfortable adding my little "story" to the mess. For me, reading a few stories wasn't enough to get me involved in the culture. The other larger reason was that I felt attached to my little story and I didn't want to offer it up to public commentary. Sure I'll post it to the blog, but that is a horse of another color in my book.

Community conventions, scriptural economies, and textual poaching...

I feel that as far as community conventions go, I just wasn't familiar enough with them to really meet them. As far as I could tell, pretty much anything went on the Doctor Who Fan Fiction sites that I browsed. Some of the quality was really excellent, some was weak (like my own story) and some of it I just want to forget because I really don't want to think about some of my favorite characters in that light. I did write a more traditional slash fan fiction dealing with a potential male/male relationship. However, this is nothing new in the Doctor Who series since it was an accepted theme in the Television series that Jack Harkness was bisexual and had a huge crush on the Doctor.

I did employ some direct textual poaching. In my short-short story below, I used a couple of lines from the Doctor Who Episode "The Sound of Drums." They are the isolated lines in italics. However, I don't think that I was as good when it came to scriptural economies. For me, that was a matter of knowing that my potential audience (classmates) were not familiar material, so I really felt the need to add in more detail.

What did I learn from this experience? I'm not the type to write or even enjoy fan fiction much. I'd rather keep my theories and fantasies to myself or just share verbally while viewing the media. It may sound a bit harsh, but I don't really care that much, certainly not enough to spend any significant time on the websites or doing much more beyond viewing the DVDs with their bonus material.