December Daily: fanfic and parenthood

armadillo1976 - "I'd appreciate a few words about navigating the issues of kids growing up and having the "mommy writes fanfic, mainly erotica, and mommy's using this word just because it sounds better than porn" conversation. My kiddo is only 5 now, and I have only written one story and am in the middle one the second one, but I see myself writing more, so I've been wondering how this conversation goes."

I asked terminally_underwhelmed to share memories from the kid side, but it's finals week, so that got me a sigh I could hear for ninety miles. If they're reading this, I hereby invite them to comment later if they feel like it.

My general approach to sex ed was to provide books and try to be so matter-of-fact about things that it wouldn't seem like a big deal to ask me to explain tampons in Target. And my general approach to smut was to remember that I personally was reading a hell of a lot of sex writing when I was twelve, most of it much less life-affirming than fanfic. But of course none of that is the same thing as "Oh, god, this is a sex scene that was written for the purpose of turning my mother on."

At first what kept my fanfic habit out of the family circle was limitations in technology. I could only afford a desktop computer, because laptops were super high-tech and very expensive in the early aughts, so I could only use the computer upstairs in the dusty office, not downstairs where the family was. I only had a dial-up modem, so "the world wide web" was a bunch of MySpace pages that took forever to load; mostly I was on mailing lists sending and receiving fanfic in emails, which don't look very tempting to a kid.

Back before the kidlet was born, when I was a journalist, I was able to compose anything on a keyboard, but by the time I got into fandom, I had lost that ability, so I was (and still am) doing all fiction composition in longhand, which again doesn't look very tempting to a kid; I was more worried about a stranger looking over my shoulder in the coffee area of Barnes & Noble.

And my fanfic hobby was already kind of self-contained; I wasn't in the habit of talking about it except to the people I was doing it with. The spouse knows I write fic, but he hasn't read anything I wrote since Sentinel. I only started going to Wiscon a couple of years ago, and before that I'd only met two fannish people in person. I'm shy. I like friendships that happen in texts.

So I think I just never brought it up until after they discovered it on their own, but I don't remember how we had the "Well, I write it as well as reading it" conversation.

I dug back through my Dreamwidth entries and my imported LiveJournal entries, and there's nothing at all until at age 13 I find a quote where the kidlet is asking me, "Who do they slash Loki with?" and then by age 14 I'm overhearing their middle-school friends talking about, like, what constitutes sufficient lubricant in a story.

And I don't remember what happened in between. I don't ever remember having a conversation about fanfic, erotica, porn, romance, anything about the internet beyond "Don't give anybody your real name or where you live," until they were old enough for me to offer them a Dreamwidth invite.

The Dreamwidth thing would have told them who I was in here, if they didn't already know, and at that point they could find anything I'd written -- I treasure a set of screenshots of the texts they sent me when they stayed up all night long reading Transfigurations, but they were sixteen by then and it didn't seem like a big deal; I figured if they wanted to skip the sex scenes they could do that.

I have a terrible memory. I wish I'd started sooner keeping a journal.














( Prompts and How To Leave One - behind cut )