Malice

[rynling]

The basic premise of my Modern BotW AU fanfic novel Malice is that Zelda is romanced by one of the Blight Ganons. It's taken a human form for plot-related reasons, and it retains some of the memories and personality of the original Ganondorf, but it's still a big messy scary monster.

While editing An Unfound Door, I wanted to reference how I wrote the Blight Ganon in the first four chapters of Malice, when it's almost completely inhuman. I thought this would be a chore, but I got sucked into the story and ended up reading 50k words of it last night.

The novel is surprisingly good, and that's distressing. I'm afraid that I might have been a much better writer in 2021. It's possible that I might have been a better artist, too. Goddamn it.

Comments

[kalloway]

While archiving stuff to my website, I've been re-reading a lot of an also had that same wonder. Though for me, more like 10-15 years ago. Maybe I was, maybe not. Maybe in another handful of years we'll both look back and think that now was actually pretty good.

[rynling]

You're absolutely correct, thank you. Distance can be useful like that.

At the same time, I've been noticing a marked decrease in positive feedback (ie, comments and kudos and subscriptions) since the pandemic. I understand that this "decrease in feedback" has been an ongoing trend since the heyday of LiveJournal, when even a short fic posted to a midsize comm could get dozens of enthusiastic comments. Still, based on my own experience and what I've read across social media, the past three years have been especially rough for many fandom writers. I suspect there's been a broad change in culture, and all the slop writing generated by machines isn't helping. I still have a lot of stories I want to tell via fanfic, but I'm feeling far less motivated to launch into a major, life-encompassing project than I used to be.

Hopefully your current fandom experience is much more positive, though! And definitely, I hope we're both able to look back and appreciate this strange cultural moment one day.

[kalloway]

I'm a bit of an outlier because I've abandoned AO3 and had disabled comments before that due to harassment. I've actually enjoyed just posting to DW and Neocities and expecting nothing (and being surprised by the occasional comments), but that's definitely a me-thing. But I do think there's been an overall change, yeah. I've come out of it more dedicated to just doing whatever the fuck I want, at least, and I'm taking that as a good thing.