oh, the irony*

[marcicat]

Every year I get excited about the guest author pep talks for NaNoWriMo. And every year, I feel somewhat irritated by most of them. Here are my vaguely cranky thoughts about the most recent pep-email from Mercedes Lackey.

1. The idea that we need a plot. Has she read Chris Baty’s book? I recommend it.

2. The idea that we need a primer on fanfic. (“For those of you who don’t know what fanfiction is, it’s pretty simple…”). This *is* the internet, ML. You’re in our playground now. And yes, we know what fanfic is.

3. The idea that “most of” the “Star Trek, Star Wars, and game-based books” are fanfiction. Dare I ask what the others are? Fiction written by non-fans? Non-fiction? Figments of our imagination?

4. The idea that fanfic isn’t real writing. (“So you can see that what starts out as fanfiction can, once you get your practice in, turn into a real, marketable project!”) It’s real, okay? It’s writing, we write it, it’s ours. Selling something doesn’t make it more real.

5. In general, lots of the pep talks seem to be geared to first-time, younger generation NaNo novelists. And hey, welcome! Lots of folks love the guest author pep!mails, and I don’t want to take away from that in any way. But there are over 187,000 people doing NaNo this year. Over half a *million* words have been written so far, and we’re less than a week into the month. That’s real. That’s a community. The whole point of NaNo is that you’re not writing in a vacuum, and that’s what I feel like a lot of the guest pep-ers don’t get.

(*I am apparently one of those people who has no idea what the word ‘irony’ means, despite looking it up on the internet, source of all knowledge, so I have no idea if this is a correct usage or not.)

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.