December Daily: fanfic and parenthood

[resonant]

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.














Specify a date if you want; otherwise I'll just answer them whenever.

This year, in addition to the usual kinds of questions, I'd also love to get storyish prompts. Storyish meaning you never know what you might get: two sentences of a story, or a description of a story that will never exist, or a love song about how much I like that trope, or a rant about my pet peeve about that trope, or I know nothing about that canon except what I see on social media and here's what I think it might be about, or Ten Reasons Why I Love/Hate/Am Indifferent To that character, canon, or trope, or ...

As always, I'd love to hear about it if you're doing the meme too.


9. coffeeandink - "You took a break from fandom for a few years. Now that you're back, what's changed and what's stayed the same?"
10. mific - "what about crossovers? Have you written any?"
11. mergatrude - "favourite bit of feedback you've received on a fic?"
12. marginaliana - ghost stories
13. runpunkrun - "a new thing you tried "
14. isis and clevermanka and trobadora - longhand?!
15. china_shop - Guardian as described by someone who only knows it via social media
16. kiezh following up with - "What have you heard about MDZS/The Untamed, and what did you think of what you heard?"
17. ride4ever's birthday prompt - "Storyish prompt: for any due South fic you've written, write a prequel or sequel snippet for the fic or meta about the before-or-after that can be imagined about the fic's story arc."
18. mific - "the genderswap trope where a character's gender is changed. Yes? No? Maybe?"
19. runpunkrun - "fake dating: yes or no"
20. minoanmiss - "One of my favorite tropes is Then Let Me Be Evil. What do you think of it/have you explored it/so on and so forth?"
21.
22.
23.
24. runpunkrun - "John and Rodney in 2020"
25.
26.
27. reginagiraffe - "Hermione/Harry/Ron from Bed and Board in 2020"
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31.

Comments

[petra]

Screenshots of the time they stayed up all night reading Transfigurations made me coo so hard you might have heard it, never mind time zones.

[china_shop]

and then by age 14 I'm overhearing their middle-school friends talking about, like, what constitutes sufficient lubricant in a story.

I think I vaguely remember that post! :-)

I treasure a set of screenshots of the texts they sent me when they stayed up all night long reading Transfigurations

Awww!

[isis]

This all sounds delightful and quite healthy, really.

And longhand! I can't imagine. Though the fact that my handwriting is terrible is probably an issue.

[minoanmiss]

I am facing this with my no-longer-little roommate, who is not only into fanfic but shares fandoms with me. Reading your essay is really illuminating.

[lunabee34]

This is really interesting.

My older daughter is so different from me; like you say, when I was a pre-teen I was reading every sexually explicit romance novel I could get my hands on. Emma is not at all interested in reading sexually explicit material. She does read a lot on AO3, but it's mostly gen.

[fox]

YES THIS.

[clevermanka]

I was (and still am) doing all fiction composition in longhand
I read that like five times and I'm still o_O That's incredible, wow!

Now I kinda wanna re-read Transfigurations. That was the first fic (and one of the few ever) to keep me up reading until 2am. So good. So so good.

[trobadora]

I was (and still am) doing all fiction composition in longhand

Wow! Do you write very linearly/not edit much while writing? Because I remember what my drafts looked like when I wrote things on paper, and ... it wasn't pretty. Crossed out, written in, scribbled in the margins, arrows and numbers to reorder sentences ... yeah, text processing came as a blessing. *g*

[kass]

♥

[resonant]

I'm getting so many questions about the longhand that I've added it to my list of questions!

[resonant]

I just dropped a question about longhand into the list, since so many people have wondered about it.

[trobadora]

Oh, great! I'm looking forward to it!

[ride_4ever]

Inspired by what runpunkrun requested for December 24 ("John and Rodney in 2020"): how about, for any dS or C6D pairing that you ship, how that ship is doing in 2020. Requested for any one of the open days after the 24th.

[laurenthemself]

I reread it at least once a year. It's comfort food for my soul.

[resonant]

It was one of the most amazing moments of my life.

[resonant]

:)

[resonant]

It's hard for me to imagine sharing a fandom with my mother -- and my mother and I are very alike and get along very well. But we would argue so much.

The main thing that stops the kidlet and me from just talking about fandoms all day long is basically sleep. I just can't binge-watch anything, nor can I stay up all night long!

Is it difficult in your house? I'm aware that I've gotten very lucky.

[resonant]

That's interesting. I'm sure I'm missing all kinds of great stuff by being mostly uninterested in gen. I guess my feeling is that there's good gen in the library but very little good sex, so I go to fandom for what I can't get anywhere else.

[resonant]

And I'm kind of scared to look at it -- I only see the problems. I listened to that Be The Serpent podcast and felt like they really cut me more slack than I deserved.

[resonant]

And back atcha!

[minoanmiss]

Our mutual interactions are 95% me listening to her -- she's a very talkative kid -- and 5% me telling her things I think she will find useful, such as reinforcing her conviction that shipwars are a stupid waste of time and energy. I try to be very focused on her experience, both becauae I'm the grownup and because I wouldn't be comfortable telling her what I think (since a lot of what I think about is how characters would hve sex, hahahahaha). So it's not bad, just interesting, and it's really cool reading someone else's perspective on this particular situation.

[laurenthemself]

As a writer, I can totally understand that, and as such I encourage you not to look at it because if you get selfconscious and take it down I will be sad.

[resonant]

I can't imagine taking it down! It doesn't feel like it belongs to me now.

[laurenthemself]

That's a relief.

Mind you, I did save an offline copy back in the days when I didn't have internet at home, so it might be around here somewhere, also the DVD commentary version.

[armadillo1976]

Hi! Thank you so much for answering.

I hear you on the not-remembering; my son is only 5 and a half, and already I cannot recall so much of how he learnt certain skills, when he began doing certain things, etc.

It would be fantastic if your kidlet (can we call them that now that they are a grown-up?) had any insight to add, once the finals are over. But of course no pressure, no expectations.

We are all very open about bodies in this house. Sex as such has come up only to a very limited extent so far in conversations with my son, but I don’t see it being a problem. Porn, tough, that’s different. While we are a pretty standard mom+dad+son kind of family, we are quite political in our lives in general, we discuss politics with our son a lot, go to demonstrations, march in Pride marches with our LGBTI* friends etc. So my inclination re: porn as in RedTube, PornHub etc. is to discourage my son (and anyone really) from watching & perpetuating the patriarchy. << Well that’s a discursive shortcut, but you know what I mean. On the other hand, porn as the exploration of what it means to be a person in a body, done e.g. in writing, as in fanfic – this, to me at least, is a whole different story. But… while I can explain the difference well in adult academic terms, I don’t feel I have a handle on doing it in terms accessible to… say, a 10-year-old? Which is why I asked.
What I am taking from your answer is that I can probably get away with simply keeping this part of my life to myself until my son is big enough to engage in this conversation on more mature terms. Which is good! A sensible, practical approach. Thank you!

[resonant]

My best friend sat her two sons down before they started middle school and had a conversation with them about the whole social environment around sex -- she called it "the locker-room talk." It impressed me so much because a lot of people assume that kids who can't get pregnant don't need to be told anything about sex. By pinning it to the kinds of things boys might say in locker rooms, she was able to bring in bullying and sexual harassment, slut-shaming, porn, the social costs of choosing not to date or have sex.

Looking back, I may have gone a little too far in outsourcing all sex education to Scarleteen.

[lunabee34]

When I first got into fandom, I was all about the porn, but now I mostly skip those parts in stories. LOL I'm much more interested in the actual story now. I blame hormones.

[lunabee34]

I love that story, too. It was one of the first fics I read when I got into HP.