R. Lee Smith's Blog, page 10

Serial Saturday Update

The internet here is inexplicably spotty tonight, in spite of the fact that we are paying out the hinder for top tier service. Our service provider (who shall remain nameless, but hint: their name is appropriately synonymous with a bag of dicks) insists it’s not on their end, which they can get away with because we are so far off the edge of nowhere that it’s either the Bag O’ Dicks or nothing. As a self-published author, I kind of need the internet, but as a raging introvert I kind of need to be far from humanity even more, so I compromise and pretend I’m not annoyed by the INCREDIBLY UNRELIABLE SERVICE! WHAT ARE WE PAYING YOU FOR, YOU BAG OF DICKS?!?

The upshot of this is that I need to hurry up and get this posted during the incredibly narrow window that the onramp to the information superhighway is open here at the Smomestead (damned if that word isn’t growing on me). So here is me telling you that my latest chapter of my Five Nights at Freddy’s fanfiction has been successfully uploaded over at fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org, so if you’re reading my FNAFic, Everything Is All Right, Part Three: Children of Mammon, head on over to one of those sites and check it out.

Progress on Part Four has been severely hampered by my surgery. I’m in very little pain, but man, is my brain not working yet. I’m so tired. I spend hours of each day ‘working,’ but I have to admit, most of those hours are me staring at my monitor wondering what I’m doing. Not in a ‘Where is this book going?’ way either, but just in a  “What is this light and what are all these buttons?” way. My father, who underwent a similar surgery just a few months ago, feels enormously vindicated by this; apparently, he did the same thing. He could write for weeks, he claims. This is terrifying to me. I don’t have much left of Part Three. I NEED to get Part Four done.

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Work, damn you! Work!

 

All I can do is keep struggling and pray my brain reboots soon. But I’m telling you all right now…there may be a slight delay between Part Three and Four. I know, I know. I think it sucks too. And I’m still hoping I’m able to pull it out and finish in time, but I still need to edit and all that and, well, it just may not happen. Maybe, but…you know…maybe not.

Anyhoo, keeping positive and all that. I am still writing as much as I can (although not updating the widget daily, as I should be. I’ll work on that too), so we’ll just have to see what happens. In the meantime, Children of Mammon will continue uploading on schedule. Be sure to check out this week’s chapter and leave me some encouraging words. I know, I know, but it really helps right now.

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The show went on, without an audience, without Freddy, without even a guitar. Bonnie watched Ana leave, listened to her footsteps recede and then return. She picked up her wallet and a few tools, opened and closed drawers on her toolchest, found her shoebox and fingered the money inside, then let it all lie and went away again. Bonnie heard the loading dock door rattle open and shut. His imaginary heart lurched and his fan revved, but then he heard her boots on the roof. A few seconds later, he heard metal feet running in the hall and Foxy shouldered through the plastic, sword drawn.

Bonnie’s ears slapped flat involuntarily and came jittering up again. Foxy glanced at him as he looked around the room and his own ears twitched, but he didn’t say anything. What was there to say anyway? At this point, even the thought of an apology made Bonnie want to punch the muzzle right off Foxy’s face, not that he’d ever hear one.

His temper flared and his vision dimmed, but Bonnie managed to fight it back for now. He had to stay calm, for Ana. He couldn’t go black tonight. She needed him.

More footsteps and here came Freddy. Bonnie’s vision dimmed again, darker. Freddy did not look at him but raised a hand in typically uncaring acknowledgement of Bonnie’s feelings while he finished inspecting the room. Ana’s upended table. Scattered splatters of blood. Her panties lying in the middle of the floor. Slowly, his arm lowered. Now he looked at the stage. “BONNIE. CHICA. WAKE UP. THAT’S AN ORDER. BONNIE. TALK. TO. ME. THAT’S AN ORDER.”

Red light flickered across the edges of Bonnie’s perceptions, registering the errors associated with breaking his routine too soon. For a moment, he thought he was going black after all, but his sight cleared and he came out of it, slower than Chica maybe, but still on his own. Holding his head—it felt weird, stuffy almost, not that he could possibly know what that felt like—Bonnie staggered to the nearest wall and leaned into it, stepping on pieces of his guitar on the way. “Where th-th-the hell were you?” he demanded, shivering.

“I’M. SORRY. BONNIE. SHE. OPENED. ME.”

There were no good excuses, but that was probably as good as they got. Bonnie, still tremoring, managed a nod and then turned his glare on Foxy. “I’m a jealous ass, huh? I t-t-tried to tell you, but-t-t I’m just a jealous ass and you ignored-d-d me. I needed you. The one fucking t-t-t—TIME TO ROCK—time in my life when I actually-ly-ly needed you.”

Foxy looked back at him, servos whining without visible movement. He said nothing. No apology, no excuse, nothing.

“I’M. SORRY,” Freddy said again. He looked at the panties and his eyes fluxed, blue and black.

“That’s nothing-ing-ing,” Bonnie muttered, rubbing his head like that could help clear it. “One of them had those in his pocket. He must-t-t have wanted to make sure he got a souvenir.”

“One of them?” Foxy echoed. “How many were there?”

Bonnie looked up at him.

The next thing he knew, red light snapped on in a broad stripe, blinding-bright. Bonnie recoiled, startled and confused, and hit the back of his head, both ears and one hand on something unyielding. At the impact, the red light flared brighter and no matter how he turned his head, it stayed right in front of him.

“What the hell is that-t-t?” he asked. The echoes were strange, too close. He started to ask Freddy what was going on, but Freddy’s eyes were gone. So were Foxy’s and Chica’s…and his own. The room was black, except for this annoying bar of red light shining in his face.

Wait, that wasn’t a light shining at him at all, that was an internal line of text. Error messages, so many that they formed an unreadable red bar across his vision.

He cleared his error log—that helped, at least enough that he could now tell he was looking at a dozen overlapping lines of text—and switched on his eyes.

What he saw made no immediate sense: A blotchy grey wall about ten feet away with a recessed light bulb in a wire cage set in the middle of it. Except that wasn’t a wall, he realized. It was a ceiling. It was the freezer’s ceiling. And he wasn’t standing, he was lying on his back. How had he not known that? Was his…? His equilibrium gauge was shut down. It took a hell of a hard knock to the head to do that.

Bonnie turned it on again and while it ran its start-up diagnostic, he went through the ever-expanding list of overrides. Yes, he knew he had 118 non-responsive pressure plates. Yes, he knew his overall structural integrity was at 77%. Yes, he knew his audio system needed maintenance. Everything about him needed fucking maintenance…

Serial Saturday Update

So first off, let me just say ten-thousand WOWs for all the well-wishing I’ve received since I got home from the hospital. I really appreciate it. I am still recovering, somewhat slower than I would like, but I’m sure much faster than is customary. Still, I figured I would post early tonight, seeing as sleep’s song is already a’calling. Seems like all I’ve done since I got back is sleep and for a chronic insomniac like me, that’s pretty awesome.

But when I’m not sleeping, I’m sort of on my feet. I went to the store and while I wasn’t able to walk, I could at least drive myself in the scootabout. Little victories.

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I even made an attempt at painting. Behold the Bison in his native habitat: Morphine.

But it is going to be an early night, so even though it’s only nine o’clock on Friday, I have already uploaded the latest chapter of my FNAF fanfiction, Everything Is All Right, Part Three: Children of Mammon. If you’re reading along, you can find it over at fanfiction.net or archiveofourown.org. If I haven’t convinced you yet, or if you’re just waiting for the whole thing to be finished before you start, please enjoy yet another teaser and let’s see if I can’t weaken your resolve.

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Step by silent step, Ana reached the end of the hall and stopped just on the other side of the plastic. Two pairs of animatronic eyes didn’t do much to light a room this size, but after the perfect blackness of the hall, they were as good as searchlights. Ana’s sugar-skull tee was a beacon; her sweaty skin all but glowed. If they were watching this doorway, there would be no way to avoid letting herself be seen when she came through, no matter how quietly she did it.

She moved to one side, hunkered low, found an edge along one of the hanging sheets and peeled it back just a crack. She studied the room beyond like it was new territory, a potential battlefield. The kitchen was just to her left, closed off by more plastic; a good ambush spot. In the back of the room, in the little hall that ran between the playground and the gym was another hiding place. Her bedroom under the curtained table, another one.

Those were the possibilities. As for the certainties, there were long shadows that shouldn’t be there on what she could see of the lobby floor and movement behind the dirty glass set in the West Hall door. So two at least. No, three. The gift shop door she’d left wide open was now almost closed and when Chica’s head turned that way, she could make out the pale blur of a watchful face, framed by scraggly hair and an unkempt trailer-trash beard. She knew him. What was his name? Trey? Trig. Trigger-Man. One of Mason’s distributers. So.

She could also see some familiar crates and her big toolchest over by the cashier’s station in the open end of the lobby. They hadn’t been able to fit all her stuff into whatever car they’d brought, so they’d had to prioritize, taking most of her big-ticket equipment, but leaving most of the tools. That was good. If she could get to them, she’d have a weapon, which was of course why they left it there, where the little light coming through the open lobby doors would have to shine on it even if Bonnie and Chica’s eyes were off. They were trying to draw her out.

Ana gave the Better Idea Fairy a full minute to show up, but the bitch must have gotten stuck in traffic, so she shifted onto the balls of her feet and took a deep breath.

“LET’S ROCK!” said Bonnie.

‘Yes, let’s,’ thought Ana and burst through the plastic at a run.

Back From the Hospital

So as some of you already know, on Sunday, I had some growing discomfort in my midsection that blossomed forth into a beautiful flower of pain by midnight. All through the night, I paced and contemplated what fresh hell this might be while I waited for it to get either better or worse. By the time my father woke up and I was still in pain (albeit no worse pain), I decided I’d better at least let him know what was going on just in case the situation developed further and a trip to the hospital became necessary. Then I attempted to go to bed, hoping to sleep it all off.

A few hours later, I gave up on sleep and staggered out to see that it was noon, which meant 12 hours of constant low-key pain, preceded by 12 more hours of discomfort, preceded by who knows how many hours of symptoms, since I have a number of other medical issues where other symptoms could hide undetected.

Off I went to the emergency room, then to admissions, then to surgery, and now I am home. The short version of anticipatory events is that now, all is well. The long version is too personal to share. However, as with so many things, there is a middle ground.

So here, for all my friends, family and readers who may be curious, is the shareable account of my time in the hospital, much of it written while I was tripping balls. I have elected to simply transcribe it here, weird formatting and all, and not edit for clarification, because I think it will be funnier that way. Enjoy!

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First, I am sick

but I don’t notice

I have been sick a long time

some things are hard to see until something happens.

 

something happens

 

but I don’t notice

The pain is new and strange but not so bad

I can live with it

i’ve learned to live with worse

Somethings are hard to see until they get worse.

 

it gets worse

 

I shower, just in case.

I pack a night bag, just in case.

I stop drinking, even though I have been vomiting, just in case.

I am not afraid. I am prepared.

 

‘I will sleep,’ I think

sometimes that works

but the pain is more than I can hide from

and now I begin to understand

 

It did not start at dawn, when I could not sleep.

It did not start at midnight, when it began to hurt.

It did not start at noon yesterday, when I threw up the breakfast you made me

(i love the breakfasts you make me)

(and the dinners we always take together)

(our own time)

It might have begun days ago

or months

or years

 

I have been sick a long time

 

My father takes me to the hospital

the pain knows where we are and fights

as all things do

to stay where it feels safe

in me

 

An hour passes. I answer all the questions whenever I am asked.

And I try to be polite

I say no, ma’am, yes sir, please and thank you

‘Manners matter,’ as Mr. Faust would say.

(the book is not finished)

(who will finish my book?)

 

The pain is getting worse

I cannot hold still

I writhe and moan and am ashamed when I cannot stop

i am making a spectacle of myself

i am a hypochondriac looking for attention

i am an addict looking for a fix

i am just trying to look bad so i’ll see the doctor faster

and I know none of these things are true

and I know they don’t think so either

(but they do o i know they do)

 

My older sister comes to wait with us, my dad and me

Just Me & My Dad

It was a book he used to read to me when I was little

just a little critter

the best part was finding the grasshopper and spider on each page

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Funny the things you remember when you don’t want to think about other things.

 

We talk about sandwiches and

how good it feels when someone you love

just brings you one

without asking

just because they thought you might be hungry

‘The male equivalent of this is to check the air pressure in your tires,’ I say

sexistly

 

We laugh. Laughter is good medicine.

My stomach hurts. I am so thirsty. I feel sick.

 

More hours pass

the doctor has come and gone

and the testing has begun.

(i know they think i’m faking this)

(i know they don’t think that at all)

 

Nurse says, ‘we need to put an IV line in.’

‘Good luck,’ I say

He’ll need it.

His name is Paco

like the song I once made up about Paco the Donkey

It was very sexual.

I want to tell him but I know I shouldn’t but it still makes me smile and I think that’s important

not much is funny now

Paco has a tattoo

(the nurse not the donkey)

I ask him what it means

that also seems important

‘This one is for my daughters, their birth signs.’

sagitarius and libra, drawn in the shape of a heart

my sisters are both sagitarius

i am libra

i knew it was important.

I tell him it is very beautiful

and sing the Paco the Donkey song to myself

silently

while he tries and tries and tries to raise a vein

 

My veins are tired.

So am I.

 

The needle is in. Good?

no good

The second needle is in. Yes?

no

Third time’s the charm.

for now

 

‘Let’s get you something for the pain,’ says the new nurse

I agree and wait and while I am waiting, expecting pills, she

puts something in my IV line

chest gets heavy

skull feels full

‘Something is happening,’ I say

‘It’s the morphine,’ she says

‘Oh, they gave you the good stuff,’ says my dad

I say, ‘Holy shit, that hit fast.’

 

I do not swear in front of my father.

 

How is the pain now?

what pain?

yeah.

 

I close my eyes just for a moment to stop my head spinning.

 

and Bison comes

 

His eyes are night, full of stars

His horns are banners, trailing sweet smoke behind him

His cap and ruff are black as good, rich earth

His legs are dark water, pouring down to fill the marks his hooves make on the clean hospital tiles

His sides are pale, clean as a movie screen

 

‘Why is this bison here?’ i ask

Everyone laughs

‘There is no bison in the hospital,’ my sister tells me

and of course i know she’s right.

as surely as i know i see Bison

when i close my eyes

i tell him he is in my head

‘Am I welcome?’ he asks and is and so, ‘That’s fine, then,’ he says

and comes close to stand beside the bed

where i am waiting

 

i look into his pale side and see

black hairs hidden there amid the creamy dun color of his pelt

waving

like wheat in the wind

pictures form

of the things he has to show me

faces places safer spaces

and water

rising water, overspilling fields, swallowing trees, engulfing mountains

until at last receding

leaving empty lifeless earth

 

‘First flood,’ says Bison and we are there

standing in muddy runnels where once oceans flowed

watching Last One sow Mankind with teeth taken from the dead

We grow like corn, reaching

We are earth-phoenices, born from death

We come free of the soil and dance, our muddy bodies full of life and our happy smiles full of teeth

 

Someone is calling my name.

i open my eyes

They have ordered a CT scan

okay

we wait

It has now been six hours since we arrived

and that is fine

Hospital things always happen in hospital time.

 

I think about Sunny and all the days I passed

holding her tiny hand to keep her from biting it

(because she hurt so much)

while i wrote

The Care and Feeding of Griffins

The Wizard in the Woods

The Roads of Taryn MacTavish

I can still see the day she died in the pages of The Army of Mab

 

I hope I can get some writing done if they admit me

i brought a notebook

just in case

I need to write out a thorough outline for Everything Is All Right

 

Writers have different priorities when it comes to facing their mortality.

 

They call my name

They are ready to take me to the CT scanner

 

there, i am made to lie flat and raise my arms over my head

both of these are painful acts

morphine is strong but pain is stronger

it finds its way in through a crack in my shoulder

soon it is

everywhere

everywhere                               everywhere

everywhere

Breathe in, says the Voice. Hold your breath

i obey

manners matter

but o it hurts

and i close my eyes

Bison comes

 

i do not see him yet, but i feel his breath on my cupped hand

as i hold still, so still, for the machine

His breath is hot and good/sour and wild

if i reached, i am sure i could touch his muzzle, velvet-damp

i do not reach

i will take no more than i am given

it is enough that i am not alone

‘You are never alone,’ he tells me.

Breathe in, says the Voice. Hold your breath

I do and we rise up, Bison and me, and leave the Voice with the machine

They know what they’re doing

They don’t need me

and i would rather be

here

sitting on the grass

safe and warm against Bison’s side

while he grazes, gazing into space at things my eyes don’t know how to see

so i watch him breathe instead

A woman appears from the dark hairs waving in the pale pelt

and sits, reflecting me in the mirror of Bison’s body

She shows me the story of the Medicine Shirts

it is one I know

i say, ‘but they all died, you know.’

‘they put on your shirts and danced and died.’

‘the bullets went right through them.’

She looks at me. Her eyes are kind

if a little exasperated

as a patient mother with a difficult child

‘Death is not an end,’ she says. ‘Open your eyes. Look up.’

i do and see

through the cracked ceiling tiles

to a sky filled with stars and fish and colors whose precise hues have no names

and need none.

‘Many of the suns you see have long died and yet

their light remains

indistinguishable

from those of living suns.

Even here, so far and so long distant from where their light began,

Men guide themselves by their light.

So it is with spirits.

Bullets may pierce bodies, but the spirit does not die.

Their light remains

indistinguishable

from living hearts and minds.

Even you, so far and so long distant from where their story began,

yet align yourself to their light.

Those people who shot my dancers,

what color were their shirts?’

 

Breathe in, says the Voice and I am in a bed in the CT scanner.

Hold your breath.

I think my shirt is grey. If I die today, no one will remember that.

Back to the room I go, where my father and my sister wait.

‘How is your pain?’ the nurse asks me.

I tell her it’s fine. I feel it, but my family is with me.

Pain shared is lessened.

 

Another hour goes by, according to the clock.

I am thirsty and tired and hurt and above all things

happy i am not alone

Bison is in my sister’s eyes as she watches my monitors

Bison is in my father’s face as he reads his book.

All is well with me.

 

Doctor comes.

We talk of surgery and associated risks.

i understand

Sign these.

i sign

I tell my sister and my father to finish my book.

They say they can’t, but I think they can.

And now we wait some more.

I wonder how my little sister is doing

She’s still at work and probably still worried about me.

At this rate, she may get home before Dad does.

I don’t want her to come home to an empty house.

she worries enough as it is

I say some of this out loud

 i think

My sister says she’ll go home so she’ll be there

and that’s good.

My sister leaves but comes back with a sandwich for my father before she goes again

He has been with me all day and she thought he might be hungry.

I cannot eat anything, but I share sandwiches in my own way.

I think again of all the quiet good that exists in the world

and especially of sandwiches.

 

They take me to a room

Bison is in the touch of my father’s hand as he

kisses my hair and tucks me in like

the child i’ll always be

to him

 

The new nurse gives me a new dose of medication in a new IV line

the last one blew out

sigh

it hits fast and hard

i’m starting to see why people do this shit for fun

at last I can sleep

I close my eyes and

Bison comes out of the clean white walls

We walk awhile in grassy plains made black with beasts

i smell them

feel the thundering of their hooves in the bones of the earth

Now there is a hospital where the herds of ten thousand thousands ran

‘And that’s fine,’ says Bison.

All things that live must die in time.

And hospitals are good medicine.

 

I sleep 12 hours.

Nurses come and go.

Each time they have to put something into me or take blood out, they have to set a new needle because the vein attached to the old one has given up.

I wake up with a headache.

Dad comes.

Older sister comes.

Younger sister has to work again.

Life is like that.

Bills have their own priorities.

I manage to stay awake two hours, then sleep just to get away from the terrible headache.

I wake just in time to learn my surgery is imminent.

awesome

no time to stress over it

My head is agony, but the anesthetic should handle it. I can tough it out.

i am so tough

 

Doctor comes with papers

Surgeon comes with papers

Anesthesiologist comes with papers

i sign everything

Nurses put me in my sexy gown and put me on a stretcher

here we go

We chat on the way to the OR, as one does.

I make the operating team laugh.

Laughter is good medicine.

They set a new needle on the third attempt and get the blood ready.

We are waiting for the surgeon to finish scrubbing.

and waiting and waiting

and waiting.

A phone rings.

He’s on his way, put her to sleep, he says.

They ask me if I’m ready.

ready ten minutes ago, folks

let’s do this

Mask goes on. Drugs go in.

bison

He is already there when I close my eyes.

He doesn’t speak, but he lies close and licks my headache away

so that’s good.

 

I wake

i think

there are faces

they tell me to stay awake

i’m going to throw up

i do

i’m sorry

They tell me it’s the anesthetic

Happens to everyone

am i going home now

We’ll see

No memory of the ride up to my room from the OR

Vague memory of my father’s beard

The nurses later tell me I said my little sisters name

tell her

tell her

Tell her what?

No idea

I sleep

with my hand wrapped

 around Bison’s smoky horn

and listen to his contented grumbles as he

chews the cud of memory

 

I wake

And I am well

There is a pain

When the nurses asks, I tell her I got a stitch in my side

(‘I got a stitch in my side,’ said Amber)

still funny

It is a good healing sort of pain and I know

it means me no harm

So I will take it home with me

and we’ll get better together.

 

Dad and older sister are here.

A wheelchair is waiting.

I have a balloon

awesome

I sit on the bed to wait for my discharge papers

I close my eyes

Bison does not come

still

He was there when it mattered and

is still with me in

pictures stories songs

 

Of all the things Bison taught me, I think I will remember one thing over all things

 

Morphine is a hell of a drug.

Serial Saturday Update

Welp, it’s going to be a short blog post tonight because I’m off to dinner, but there’s a good long chapter over at fanfiction.net and archiveofourown for those of you reading my FNAFic, Everything Is All Right, Part Three: Children of Mammon! Sorry to run out on you so suddenly, but I haven’t eaten in twelve hours and I’m just this side of starving. I’m thinking pizza. For some reason, I’ve really been craving it lately…

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So it looked like the scrapping thing was a bust, which was fine with Riley, since the little he’d understood of the process sounded like a whole lot of work, but he was glad they’d come anyway, because this place was cool. He’d been in a few abandoned buildings before, back in his hometown, but only after they’d already made the transition to flophouse. Crawling under the rusted drop-link barricade and through the heavy doors to see that giant banjo-playing chicken had been like going through some kid-show magic door into a cartoony new world.

He wandered out of the lobby as the others argued over all the stuff that wasn’t there, pushing through sheets of thick, hanging plastic into a huge room where he guessed people used to eat. There was only one table left and no chairs at all, but there was a stage over on the inward wall, so he guessed this was where the animal-robots used to sing and stuff. As he got closer, he saw an old electric guitar still laying on the stage, one of the funny looking ones that was split at the bottom into two points instead of round. It was pretty beat-up and the strings were gone, but it was heavy, so maybe it still worked, which meant one of the other guys would want it. Riley held onto it for a while anyway, looking wistfully around as he tried in his limited way to imagine the show, but then he saw another plastic statue, this one of an alligator, and put the guitar down so he could get a better look.

It was sitting up on his hind legs like a dog begging at the table, holding a big old brown jug and wearing a plastic bandana molded to its neck. Its eyes were gone, giving it a black-socket stare over that cheerful toothy gator-grin. It stood in the corner of the room between a wide doorway covered in plastic and a window to the next room also covered in plastic. All the doors out of this place were covered in plastic, in fact, which gave even this big room a closed-in feeling; anything could be out there, just beyond that plastic, watching. It was all incredibly spooky in a fun way, but Riley kept his enjoyment to himself, intensely aware that he was the only one having a good time.

“I don’t get it,” Slater kept saying and at the moment, he was saying it as Trigger slammed him up against the wall. “I was here just last winter and this place was packed! It was shoulder high in that front room! It took me an hour to dig in and there was stuff here, I swear to God! Everything was still here! The stuff in the gift shop, the fucking cash register, everything!”

“Well, it’s gone now.” Bats came into the dining room too, sweeping his flashlight along the ceiling. There was a pretty big hole up there, like it had all fallen in, although there was nothing on the floor and no hole straight through to the sky. Riley quickly found himself a spot to stand against the wall next to the table where he was out of the way. “Christ, everything’s gone. There’s no lights, there’s no speakers, there’s no…Guys, look at this.”

Four more flashlight beams homed in on a hole in the wall next to the alligator, fairly large and almost perfectly square, that exposed some of the wood inside the walls and a little blue box with a plug-thingy in it.

“Oh what the fuck,” Trigger said in an angry, baffled way.

“That’s a stud,” Riley supplied, pleased that he’d remembered what Ana had called it.

“Not that, dumbass,” Bats said, and pointed at the plug-thingy. “There’s no wires. Someone’s already been here.”

“Wasted my fucking night,” Dentist muttered, walking over to the table and lifting the black cloth that covered it. “Or maybe not. Looks like someone’s living here.”

“No way,” said Bats and Slater together. They looked at each other and both stepped back. “Not in Freddy’s,” Bats said, by himself this time. “Nobody comes here, man.”

“We’re here,” replied Dentist, moving on to investigate whatever was behind the plastic sheets at the back of the room.

Slater’s friend, Wyborn, had still not come all the way out from the lobby. Now he raised his hand like a kid in school and said, “Guys, do you smell that?”

Everyone stopped what they were doing to sniff the air.

“That’s the quarry,” said Slater.

“That’s blood,” said Bats, grinning at Riley. “Freddy’s been hungry.”

Riley laughed obligingly, unintimidated. He’d been around Mason long enough to know what blood smelled like. The restaurant had all the usual derelict-building smells, enhancing its spooky atmosphere, but the strongest odors were not threatening ones.

“No, that’s fresh-cut lumber,” said Wyborn urgently. “Look!”

All of them aimed their flashlights at the floor. Although it was way cleaner than any abandoned building ought to be, it was far from spotless and the checkerboard tiles showed plenty of smudgy tracks, as well as stuff Riley had heard Ana call construction-dandruff: splatters of plaster and paint, sawdust and grit, some with bootprints stamped into them and a few that looked like the marks of bare feet.

Writer’s Workshop Wednesday

Wow, have we really come to the end of another eight-week series on Writer’s Workshop Wednesday? I must be getting old, because I find myself saying stuff like, “Where does the time go?” more and more often and less and less ironically. Also, I’ve noticed I hurt more when the weather’s about to change and I need help with computers.

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Also, there are kids on my lawn.

I must say, it’s been enormously liberating to talk about the process of writing fanfiction in a forum where no one is yawning, sidling away or openly mocking me. Sure, it helps that it’s my own blog, so technically, I could write an 8-part series on grilled cheese sandwiches if I wanted to. No one’s going to stop me. All the same, I’m glad I did it and just as glad to be able to get back to my serious work when this post is over.

Who would have ever thought my alien bugsex and zombie apocalypse romance would be considered my ‘serious’ work?

But okay, I’ve done enough of these to establish a protocol. The last part of any Writer’s Workshop series is always a rambling summation and it’s four in the morning as I write this, so I am in exactly the right headspace to ramble. Let’s do this!

Fans Who Fic

Part Eight

Tips, Tricks and Final Thoughts

So what are the tips and tricks to writing a wildly successful fanfic? Hell if I know. I think I’ve written a good one and I’m proud of it, but it by no means is wildly successful. On ff.net, even if all the reviews left on my works were posted (as opposed to more than half of them vanishing into an internet black hole; what the eff is up with that, ff.net?), I’d still only have a couple hundred reviews on each part of the series. Same goes for ao3. And don’t get me wrong, considering I started posting from a brand-new account, ‘a couple hundred’ positive reviews on each installment is awesome and I’m grateful for every one of them. However, it does make a “Tips and Tricks for Successful Fanfic” post somewhat premature. Fortunately, I have a wider pool than my own work to draw from.

One of my followers here (shoutout to Allie) recently asked me to recommend some fanfic, which gave me the opportunity to go back through my bookmarks and do some reading, reminding me not only of some great stories, but also how incredibly lucky I am to be able to do what I do for a living. Anyone else who spent three hours reading Harry Potter fanfics at work would be fired. Particularly since I’m not wearing pants.

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I’ve spoken to HR about it, but I told me there’s really nothing I can do.

But as I was re-reading those stories, I noticed some things. These stories had thousands of kudos and glowing reviews; it obviously wasn’t just me who thought they were good. Why? What specifically did they do to elevate themselves above the countless other HP-fics out there? So I started looking at them more critically and I made some Holmesian deductions, by which I mean, they are almost painfully obvious.

My first observation is, they’re technically well-written. Little typos get by all of us and we all pick and choose our battles with the Big Book o’ Style and Grammar (I’ll give up my Oxford Comma when they pry it from my cold, limp, and dead hand), but without exception, the authors of the most popular and best reviewed works have turned out a polished, professional-looking product. I can’t tell you how many times I have gone a’browsing through the blurbs and seen some variation of “…Im just a bad spelr so ther (=^-ω-^=)”

People, you are literally typing that on a computer. You have no excuse not to run a spellcheck. And bragging about your incompetence on your own splash page is maybe not the best way to self-advertise. In other words…

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Ergo, Tip Number One: Edit. Go over it at least once before posting with a critical eye toward spelling, punctuation, grammar and formatting…and of the four of them, formatting is probably the most important. Nothing’s worse than clicking on a nice premise and getting slapped in the eyeballs with an unreadable brick of text. A little extra time and effort goes a long way toward setting your work apart from the rest. Without it, it just looks like the author didn’t care, and (sing along if you know the words!) if the author doesn’t care, why should the reader?

Observation Number Two: They all had a story to tell. This seems like it shouldn’t even need saying, but anyone who’s read a lot of fanfiction knows how much of it is either “A Day In The Life Of…” or “More Shagging Than A Carpet Warehouse In 1974.” In fact, if you read fanfiction, you can probably think of hundreds of examples of each of those types of stories. Now…can you name even one by title?

So yeah, Tip Number Two: Have a plot. Odds are good that what brought you into the fandom in the first place was a damned compelling story (along with a certain sexy character). If you’re writing fanfiction at all, it’s probably because you didn’t want that story to end. But it’s not enough to just add some more characters and shake it up. Agitation is not the same thing as tension. I think a lot of fanfic writers start out with a great idea for a character or a ship and then jump right in without working out what they’ll all be doing (apart from each other). When the summary for your book is ‘the one where Loki gets with Thor,’ you’re in trouble, because not only is that not edgy, it’s not interesting either.

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You’ll never outweird the actual list of things Loki has slept with anyway.

So yeah, you need a plot. And not to get mean or anything, but a lot of the time, the plot for fanfiction is “OC saves the day”. But from what? Why? How? What makes a story memorable is not the victory, but the risk. It’s not enough to just throw in a bitchy rival or introduce a villain who kidnaps the love interest two chapters before the end of the book. A good plot is like good sex: There’s an introduction, a certain mood is set, events are set in motion, there’s an increasing sense of urgency and action and growing tension leading to a climax, followed by a little time to rest and reflect, and then it ends and hopefully, you spend the rest of your life thinking about it at odd moments with a little smile. Have a look at this:

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This is the basic model for probably 90% of all stories in the history of storytelling, and the reason it is used so often is because it works. If you’re new to writing, you might consider drawing out an outline first, both to help you keep track of plot points and to help keep canon elements straight. I don’t usually write with an outline, but you better believe I did for Everything Is All Right. The outline for that series is six pages long, which is nothing compared to the sixty-plus pages of notes and maps, let alone all the websites I bookmarked for research. This is time-consuming and can feel tedious, especially when you’re itching to get at the actual story, but realism and details are what makes a story immersive, and that’s what your readers will remember about it and the author who wrote it.

Observation Number Three: Characters are well-developed. This doesn’t necessarily mean all canon characters are portrayed exactly as they appear in the source material, but they’re usually at least recognizable. And even when they’re not, they can still be great characters. A lot of fanfic writers try to make the villain sympathetic; the ones who succeed do it not by making the villain suddenly do and say sympathetic things that are grossly out of character, but by writing from the villain’s PoV, so that the reader gets to ‘see’ more of that villain’s thoughts and motives. Then when they do say or do things that would seem out of character, it’s understandable. When it comes to original characters, they are introduced in a way that feels natural and have balanced traits, with strengths and flaws. They ‘fit’ in the world, drawing from and adding to its lore. They can interact with the canon characters without upstaging them or turning into the pretty lamp that everyone is fighting over. Dialogue flows naturally, is consistent with the personality of the character speaking, and is tagged to make it easy for the reader to follow.

So, Tip Number Three: Keep characters consistent. Write up a character sheet if that helps and don’t forget the negative traits. Perfect characters are the enemy of all good books. Make sure each character has his or her own voice and style. Writing every character the same way, with the same responses and the same speech patterns, makes everyone equally forgettable. Oh, and remember that nothing dates your book like slang and pop culture references, so use it sparingly. Same goes double for swearing, and yes, that is hilarious advice considering it comes from someone who once wrote the line, “I’m a grown-ass woman and I’ll talk however the hell I want to, so yeah, fuckity fuckity bitchtits fuck.” Taken in the context of who was speaking, who she was speaking to, and what the situation between them was in that scene, that line was 100% justified.

So there. (=^-ω-^=)

Observation Number Four: They legit know their shit. Even those authors who write AU are clearly familiar with the canon and can use it with great effect to make their version of events feel ‘real’. Some of the best fanfiction is used to explore theories, and although I consider myself a purist, even I don’t mind seeing canon twisted as long as it tells a good story and is still identifiable within the fandom’s universe.

Tip Number Four: Know your canon. You don’t have to know every character’s birthday or favorite food and be able to trace their family tree back at least seven generations (although it couldn’t hurt), but you do need to know the world in which those characters live. Muggle, mutant, Jedi, warp drive, nazghul—every fandom has its own unique language; you need to be able to speak it. And remember that while you’re writing for the people who have been in the fandom as long as you have and who know the lore as well as (if not better than) you do, you are also writing for people who may be much newer to it. Do not introduce canon characters with nothing but a name and assume your reader knows everything they need to know about him or her. Ideally, anyone should be able to pick up your story and enjoy it, whether they’re a fan or not.

Now if this is all starting to sound suspiciously like a lot of basic advice that could apply to any book and not just fanfiction, that’s because it is. Fanfiction is just another genre, no different from any other. It can evoke all the same feelings. It deserves all the same respect.

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Obviously, there are exceptions.

And, if I can leave you with one last piece of personal advice, it is this: Write because you’re a fan, not because others are. People grow. Their tastes change. The population of every fan community is constantly changing as new episodes, books, games, or movies come out…or don’t. Some members will move on, new people will join, and only time will tell if a fandom has staying power. If the source stops producing or its star of popularity begins to dim, does that mean you shouldn’t start writing that fanfic after all (or worse, stop writing once you’ve started posting)?

To bring this down to my level, each time a new FNAF game appears, people come out of the woodwork to proclaim that it’s ‘dead’ and the fandom is ‘toxic’ and the community is nothing but 10-year-old edgelords who want to fuck furries. Whatever, dudes. My love of a thing is not reliant upon approval from a YouTube comment section. Nor do I define ‘toxic’ as ‘people who write fanfiction or create fanart’. I don’t necessarily approve of everything out there in the community, but until someone appoints me Supreme High Judge of FNAF Fanworks, I guess that’s not a problem. If I don’t want to see dicks and boobs drawn on animatronics, I don’t Bing it. It’s as simple as that. Are there 10-year-old FNAF fans? Sure, probably even younger. But I’m not. My 70-year-old father is a FNAF fan now (after being introduced to it by way of my fanfic, incidentally) and I doubt he’s the oldest.

A fan community is the same as any other community. It’s made up of all kinds of people, people of all ages, all shapes and sizes, all occupations—all individuals. So relax. You’re not alone and you’re not wrong or dumb or toxic just for liking anime or orcs or animatronics. For other reasons, maybe, but not for that. So love what you love. Write stories, write songs, create art, make videos, make games…and share them. The only thing better than being a fan is being the reason someone else becomes one.

Serial Saturday Update

So as you can see by the WIP widget in the sidebar, the 1k/100 days challenge is off to a decent start. I’ve made my 1000 word goal every day so far, except for today (and I hope to finish before midnight), because I spent most of the day in town, shopping for a ninja outfit for a teddy bear.

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I only agreed to become an adult on the stipulation that I could do whatever I wanted.

 

So does that mean Part IV is finished? Ha hahahaha ha! HA HA HA HA!

No.

Writing is my dream job. Unfortunately, the dream is quite often that one where you’re running down a corridor but the door at the end isn’t getting any closer, and in this case, there’s also a Deadline Monster creeping up behind you, step by step, week by week…

But I think I can get it done (and edited, ugh) before Part III concludes. I’ll try anyway. Yeah, yeah, “Do or Do not.” With respect, shut up, Master Yoda. Success is not the only valid indicator of effort, and if I thought it was, I’d never try anything. Silly fanfiction or not, this series has been a massive undertaking. Posting a completed, polished chapter each week is, for me, a damned lofty goal. I’d love to say I never missed a week when I get to the end, but if I can’t, oh well. It wouldn’t be a challenge if there was no chance of failure.

Not sure if that’s a pep talk or a pre-emptive excuse. Only time will tell, I guess.

But for now, I’m hanging in there and to prove it, please enjoy the next chapter of my FNAFic, Everything Is All Right, Part Three: Children of Mammon, now available on fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org! This is the chapter that finally kicks off the events foretold roughly 700 pages and two books ago: July 4th, a day that begins with Ana on the roof and will end with her lying on the floor in a puddle of blood…

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The sun did not rise until 6:01, but for Ana, the day began at 3:48, when she gave up on even pretending to sleep and crawled out from under her table to dress and get to work. By four, she was on the roof, fueling herself with Redline and Pop-Tarts as she spread hot asphalt, set another bucket to heating, laid thermoset, took an empty bucket off the roof and hauled a full one up, just in time to spread some more hot asphalt.

At a quarter to five, as Ana lowered her breather to take a long, thirsty swig of Redline under a sky gone greyish with pre-dawn light, Will Slater’s alarm clock rang and he roused himself with a cough and a curse to shut it off. Three streets down, co-worker Matthew Wyborn was already awake and in the shower following his morning workout, singing along with Katy Perry, but quietly, so as not to wake the parents he still lived with. Another two streets and a few houses further east, Bats was just dozing off in his half-converted basement bedroom while Riley slept soundly on the sagging sofa a few feet away and dreamed happily of mowing the lawn for Bat’s mom while she made dinner and called him a good boy. And well out of town, perched high on the edge of the canyon, an old man who slept very little stepped out onto the balcony of his second-floor bedroom with a cup of coffee and a single slice of unbuttered toast to watch the sun rise over the quarry. In the far distance, he could just make out the unnatural edges and angles of the only house on Coldslip Mountain, where he imagined Ana Stark to be at this moment. He drank his coffee and thought about her, but when his cup was empty, he left the balcony and got on with his day.

It was the Fourth of July.

Wednesday Writer’s Corner

When I first started this series, I thought I was going to have trouble coming up with eight different aspects of fanfiction to talk about, when as usual, my real problem was learning to shut up. Now here I am, on the seventh of eight posts, and since the last one is mentally reserved for something else, I guess I’ve run out of wiggle room. It’s time to pull out the old soap box…

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Good thing I always carry one of these things around with me.

…and lay some uncomfortable truths down.

Look, fanfiction is fun, fanfiction is awesome. I write fanfiction and apparently, so do most of my writer-friends. In fact, in answer to my casual poll, more than half of pretty much everyone I personally know have admitted to writing fanfic or drawing fanart at one point in their lives (usually overlapping their ‘horny adolescent emo’ phase), so either I run in some wild circles (always a possibility) or it’s a lot more common than the ‘fringe’ society it is purported to be. Gee, it’s almost like people make fun of it and make others feel embarrassed to be part of it.

Whatever, that’s a subject for another day. Today, I’m going to try and stay focused. So, as I was saying, fanfiction is fun and I personally believe that fanworks enrich a fandom by allowing the fans to feel as though they are a real part of the source universe. I could even go as far as to say that I consider certain fandoms to be a community in the true sense of the word. Having said that, and with all apologies to Mr. Spock, the needs (and feelings) of the many do not outweigh those of the Few or the One, by which I mean behind every good game or book or movie, there is a Creator, and that Creator possesses the absolute right to determine what is done to his, her or their creative property.

So let’s ask the real question here: Is fanfiction even legal? Well, yes and no. Great answer, huh? You want a better one? You can start here. That’s Sections 101-111 of the U.S. Copyright Law and I’ma tell you right now, it’s a dry read. Bearing in mind that I am not a lawyer, let me break it down for you.

The copyright owner for any one particular work has the exclusive right to create derivative works (meaning any work that draws upon any established character, setting or situation exclusive to the owner’s original work; in other words, all fanworks), or to approve or endorse the derivative works created by others, OR to condone those works or prohibit others from making them available. That is their right and ONLY their right, and no, just crediting the source in your fanwork or acknowledging that you, a humble fan, are using characters from, for example, Harry Potter without J.K. Rowling’s permission does not release you from the possibility of legal ramifications if she stumbles upon your 140 chapter opus, The Boy Who Banged, and decides to sue you so hard your hair spontaneously catches fire. If anything, it worsens your legal position considerably, since you admitted you know what you were doing was wrong. And no, just because other people write worse stuff does not mean you get a pass. The “But you let HIM do it!” defense didn’t work on my mom, it didn’t work on that cop last week and it will not work in any court of copyright law.

But is there a right way to write fanfiction? Let’s talk about that.

 

Fans Who Fic

Part Seven

Covering Your Ass: What Everyone Should Know About Copyright Abuse and the Fair Use Law

 

Copyright protections are, and should be, absolute, but there are a few ways for fans to wiggle around them.

First and foremost, not every character or franchise is protected at all. Copyrights expire (in the case of written works, the author holds the copyrights for as long as they live, plus something like a hundred years after they die, AND they can give their copyright over to the control of their family or estate, and so extend the lifetime of the copyright), and certain works are already in the public domain and available for anyone to use.

HOWEVER! Be aware that there’s not always just the original work’s copyright to think about but also derivative works and their copyrights. A great example of this is that of Frankenstein’s monster. That book is in the public domain, so anyone can use Frankenstein or the monster. Great, right? But beware, because there is a very real and legal-binding difference between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (in public domain) and Universal Studio’s Frankenstein (still copyright protected). How the hell can they do that? Because Mary Shelley came up with the concept, but did not describe the monster beyond a few broad strokes, nothing so distinctive as to create a recognizable character. ‘Reanimated dead dude’ is just not specific enough to be protected, even when her book’s copyright was active. However, this…

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…is, and believe me, Universal is serious about keeping their monsters on lock. Are there unauthorized Frankys out there, flattops, groans, bolts and all? A few, but I think you’ll find that of them fall squarely under the protection of Parody/Satire.

This is the first and probably best-known loophole in the copyright law, and come to think of it, it might be why so many fanfics tend to be aggressively goofy. If so, this is where I should really point out that making fun of something doesn’t automatically make it a parody or satirical. The actual definition of ‘parody’ is pretty ambiguous from a legal standpoint, but its main points seem to how the original content is used and whether the transformed work can be seen as injurious to the original content.

Example. Some years ago (quick Google search), in 2003, the webcomic Penny Arcade responded to American McGee’s gritty version of Alice in Wonderland by making a fake promo poster for American McGee’s Strawberry Shortcake. They were promptly hit with a takedown order by American Greetings, who owned Strawberry Shortcakes content copyright. The good folks behind Penny Arcade complied because (and I’m paraphrasing what I remember of the statement because I’m too lazy to go into the next room and look at the book and too lazy to look it up online) on second look, they realized they had been cutting into Strawberry Shortcake in order to parody American McGee. And sure, they later cut into American Greetings on purpose, but in that circumstance, they knew they were wrong and they did the right thing for the right, rather than just the legal, reasons.

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Integrity. Like you need another reason to love Penny Arcade.

I used the Harry Potter example in the intro to this post because it’s such a perfect example of the tricky situation surrounding creator approval. J.K. Rowling’s position on fanworks is largely considered favorable. She COULD refuse to allow any commercial entity to sell any beverage called Butterbeer, for example, but CHOOSES to let the butterbeer flow (provided you do not copy the official label of the butterbeer sold at Universal Studios’ Potterworld). She likes fanworks. She says it’s flattering. But she has made several statements to the effect that she does not like the smutty stuff. I don’t know if she’s ever disliked something to the point of demanding a take-down (the sheer volume of slash fic out there involving the Potterverse would suggest otherwise), but it’s worth mentioning.

I learned this with a simple Google search, which is something I highly recommend anyone do before they make their fanworks available. It’s just common sense, especially as there are creators out there with a take-no-prisoners attitude (and I repeat, they have EVERY RIGHT to do so). People have been taken to court before, although it’s usually companies squabbling with other companies when it happens (DC and Marvel have a long history of ‘borrowing’ ideas from one another), and it usually devolves into a costly debate on what Fair Use means, and I’ll tell you right now, it doesn’t mean what you think it means.

How can I say that with such certainty? Because the Fair Use Act was written to be deliberately vague. It’s actually easier to define what it DOESN’T protect.

Fair Use does not allow for any derivative work to be used for commercial purposes or for profit. In its most basic definition, this means you’re not allowed to sell your fanfiction, but there’s a lot of grey in that area. When my mom wrote Star Wars fanfiction back in the day, there was no internet, so every book meant printing out about 100 pages, plus shipping it to those who wanted to read it, and you know, hiring an illustrator and binding it with a cover at the local Kinkos. These costs added up, so before she got too far along, she contacted the Lucasfilm lawyers for permission to distribute and to sell but not commercially and not to make a profit. And Lucasfilm, who have a reputation for hardassery as far as copyright goes, agreed. So you never know.

Not for profit also means you aren’t allowed to apply protected content to any existing commercial enterprise, such as using, say, Bugs Bunny as the mascot for your exterminating business, even if you change his fur to brown and dress him in coveralls. If it’s still obviously Bugs Bunny, it’s not Fair Use. On the other hand, some authors and a growing number of studios consider fanfiction to be a form of promotion and not only allow it to be distributed, but allow you to sell it. Kindleworlds has a short (but growing!) list of these ‘Approved For Fanwork’ titles. HOWEVER! If the copyright holder objects to the content of your GI Joe fanfiction, they can still demand you take it down, even while other authors are allowed to go on selling theirs, EVEN if you consider your content to be less controversial. Again, the “You let HIM do it” defense does not fly in court.

The essential nature of the original content is also considered. When adult content finds its way into fanworks based on source material intended for very young audiences, it can be that much harder to claim Fair Use as a defense. In fact, the author of such a work may easily find themselves in violation of some other laws, such as the distribution of pornography that portrays pedophilia or bestiality.

 

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Or both.

Additionally, Fair Use does not allow for basic reworkings of original content. In other words, you can’t novelize your favorite episode of Gravity Falls and call it fanfiction (I mean, you probably could; the creator of Gravity Falls is infamously tolerant of fanworks, but as a legal point, you can’t), and you can’t “MiSTie,” meaning copy an original work and just throw in your own commentary. In order to even be considered as protected by Fair Use, you must transform the source into something original.

You can do this a number of ways, but the easiest is simply to strip away the recognizable features of the source until you arrive at the base elements. You can’t write about a boy named Harry Potter with a lightning-bolt shaped scar on his forehead who was kept under the stairs until he was admitted to a magical school called Hogwarts; You can write about a boy named Tip Taylor with one white eye who was kept in the attic until he was admitted to a magical school called Whispergraves. Concepts cannot be copywritten. Plots cannot be copywritten. Personalities cannot be copywritten. Of course, all these things together may still be judged as plagarism, particularly if young Tip up there has two friends named Roland Ottery, who is poor and has a big, boisterous family, and Helen Ranger, who is the daughter of two non-magical Mumbles and is super into books, and your first ‘original’ work is titled Tip Taylor and the Magician’s Marble. Seriously, the law is vague for a reason and that reason is that so a judge can use her common sense and slam the gavel on your sneaky ass if you try to steal someone else’s work.

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It is the decision of this court that you quit your bullshit and you are hereby sentenced to have some sense slapped into you. Bailiff!

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you can’t claim Fair Use if the copyright holder can successfully argue that your fanwork has the potential to affect the value of the source material or any future works. That can be tricky to prove, but it can be even trickier to disprove.

Oh, and so-called ‘celebrity fanfics?’ That’s not remotely protected by Fair Use (and not always protected by the Parody defense). Writing about a real person, especially if you go for the shock/smut audience, is straight-up slander and any of these people (who, being celebrities, are likely to have more money for lawyers than you) can sue the hairs right off your ass if you do it.

It’s worth pointing out that copyright protections and permissions vary from country to country, and in today’s global internet society, many people are hesitant to pursue legal action where the lines blur, but ‘hesitant to pursue legal action’ does not mean ‘totally cool yo’, so don’t rely a measly ocean to save you when you publish Mickey: The Mouse, the Man, the Nymphomaniac. Disney will airlift your ass out of Antarctica if they have to and while you are being roasted by their lawyers, they will be building a rocket in the Tomorrowland pavilion so they can fire your fresh ashes into space.

The long and short of it is this: The only real protection that fanworks have is the tolerance of the creators whose work we fans are infringing upon, so if there is one rule, it is BE RESPECTFUL.

Find out what the creator’s actual stance on fanfiction is. Do not rely upon the “But you let HIM do it” defense. A few seconds on Google is a small price to pay to prevent a cease-and-desist order (or worse, a summons).  When in doubt, it can’t hurt to try and contact the creator and ask. Most of them are sensible people and would also much rather simply say, “Yeah, that’s fine,” or “As long as there’s no explicit content, please,” than get lawyers involved. However, once you go this route, you’d better be prepared to abide by their decision, even (and especially) if their answer is “No.” You do not want to put a Creator in a situation where they think the matter’s settled, only to have their PR Agent burst into their office a year later with the crazy eyes going, yelling, “Have you SEEN The Sexy Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog: Gotta Cum Fast, Volume 69, The Sexxening?”

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Come on now. Why is “sexy sonic the hedgehog” even a thing? I am so on a watchlist…

Be aware that many creators are perfectly okay with fanfiction that is posted on fanfiction sites, such as Wattpad or Ao3 or ff.net, but do NOT want it made generally available, such as on Amazon, EVEN IF YOU ARE ‘SELLING’ IT FOR FREE.

If the creator is not okay with selling fanfiction (or is not okay with the content of your not-for-profit fanfiction), you must respect that. This doesn’t mean stop writing and burn all copies, but it does mean make sure that you sever all identity markers with the source material if you’re going to continue to make it available.

Above all, remember that copyright law does not exist to screw fans out of creative expression. It exists to protect the integrity of a creator’s work, which is something that everyone who has ever written some variation of “…Summer Windborne Lovepony is MY OWN OC and you CANNOT USE HER WITHOUT MY PERMISSION1!!!11” should appreciate.

Good fanfiction is, at its heart, a labor of love. I believe that. But bad fanfiction is…well, bad, and I can completely understand why a creator would want to reserve the right not to have their name (and professional reputation) attached to a viral shitsterpiece.

…and on a completely unrelated and non-hypocritical note, be sure to check out the new chapter of my FNAF fanfic! Updates every Saturday (or until Scott Cawthon tells me to stop).

 

 

Serial Saturday Update

Well, I just got the new chapter of my FNAFic, Everything Is All Right, Part Four: Children of Mammon uploaded and my sister, Cris, has invited me out for celebratory pancakes, so I’ma make this quick, ya’ll. Pancakes is awesome. So if you’re reading along, head on over to fanfiction.net or archiveofourown.org, and if not, please enjoy this snippet and maybe you will change your mind!

Pancakes ho!

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Ana dreamed again of the maze in the ceiling, but it was smaller, close around her and cluttered with animatronic limbs wrapped in moldy clothes and stuffed with rats and wires. The air she fought to breathe was hot and thick, a poison brume. She crawled on her belly, her head bumping the top of the maze with each frantic lunge forward, but gained little ground. The maze had her and it meant to keep her. Her boots found no traction on metal walls made slick with blood. She struggled onward, as all trapped things struggle, without hope of escape. She was not alone up here. The sounds that followed her in the darkness were at times the ticking of a clock and at other times the whine and wheeze of old servos and gears.

Ana looked back and even though the maze was lightless, she could see it, the thing her aunt had become, the thing she had perhaps always been. That white face, laughing and weeping together, black sockets for eyes, spiders spilling from the trapdoor of its gaping mouth—the Puppet. Long bone-white arms blistered with iridescent scales, straggles of blonde hair and dusty cobwebs hanging before her like a bridal veil—the Mermaid. Then it spoke, although the mouth didn’t move, and in spite of the low scratch of static that came with it, the voice was familiar—Aunt Easter.

“Just a little further, Honeybunny,” this nightmare amalgamation crooned. “You’re almost there.”

Ana scrambled away, slapping and clawing at the bloody walls of the maze in a futile search for a handhold, but the nearest corner wall that might offer some leverage was just out of reach, as it had been since the start of this dream.

“We missed you,” Aunt Easter said and her voice was just the same—light and laughing, young and pretty—while the hand that reached out to clutch at Ana’s ankle was white as bone, torn open to expose her inner framework and stained padding. “We’ve all been waiting for you.”

Ana kicked away and fled, inch by excruciating inch, gasping for breath and choking on the little she found.

“We had a deal,” Aunt Easter called, coaxing, pleading. “We can be a family now!”

“No!” Ana rasped, kicking blindly as she pulled herself away. She hit something. She felt the impact, heard the cry. She kicked again and again and again, until the sound of her aunt’s moans silenced and all she could hear was the wet crunch of meat and bone, and still she kicked, rasping, “No! No! No!”

“That’s my girl,” a purple voice whispered, breathing out of every part of the maze at once.

Ana looked up and suddenly the maze was gone, but she was just as trapped lying on Aunt Easter’s bed in the purple room with Erik Metzger’s arms around her. His glasses caught the sun streaming through the window, filling his eyes with burning light. His shirt was unbuttoned, exposing his bare chest, smooth as sculpted plastic. She could feel his inhuman heat, hear the tick of gears and wheeze of fans. He smiled; there was a second set of metal teeth behind his perfect white ones. “My, my,” he said, pulling her closer. “How you’ve grown.”

Writer’s Workshop Wednesday

Today is Day Three of the 100k/100 Days Author Challenge and no, writing this blog does not count toward my 1000 word quota. I’ve got to admit, I was tempted to call it a completed series and just hope no one remembered I promised eight posts, but on the other hand, last week’s lesson on Mary Sue was so cathartic that I can’t resist the opportunity to vent again and pass it off as instructional. And if there is one topic about which I could happily rant for hours, it is today’s.

Fans Who Fic

Part Six

Going Dark: Adult Content in Fanfiction

This is one of the Unforgivable Sins and the reason fanfiction as a whole has such a bad rep. And no, of course I don’t think that’s fair. For me, the difference between liking a thing and being a fan of it is the difference between a story I can appreciate and one to which I can relate. And speaking just for myself, I have a hell of a hard time relating to a world in which no one cusses, dies or has sex.

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Yep. Buckle in, I’m going to be defending this.

Not every story needs these elements and honestly, if they’re not needed and shoehorned in just for shock value, an otherwise good story can be ruined. And yes, I’m aware that I’m saying that as someone who’s dropped the F-Bomb over a thousand times (so far!) in my series about animal-shaped robots at a kid’s pizza parlor. On the other side of that same coin, if those elements are appropriate and never delivered, their absence can be just as distracting. We’ve all seen that PG-rated movie that should have been an R, and vice versa. The threshold may be a subjective one, but it’s still very real.

I’ve just spent the last five minutes staring at my keyboard, trying to figure out just where that threshold is for me and damned if I can. It’s not simply a matter of the source material’s general audience. I’ve read (and written) R-rated fanfiction based on kid’s cartoons that I thought was awesome and I’ve read (and written) R-rated fanfiction based on much more adult works where the extra adult content made the story almost physically painful to read. To me, there’s nothing inherently taboo about having A cartoon character swear or strip, just not EVERY cartoon character. I can only speak for myself, of course, but it’s my opinion that even though a show (or book or game or whatever) doesn’t depict or even hint at sex or violence, the world it exists in still might.

Then again, I guess the argument could be made that since the characters in, for example, My Little Pony have genders, there must be pony sex happening somewhere, but there’s not a lick of violence, so by my own rules, sexytimes is technically okay but Cupcakes is not.

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And I don’t know about you, but this is never okay for me.

I’m well aware that my own personal threshold for what’s gratuitous is probably set quite a bit higher than other people’s. And I’ve admitted I cuss up a storm in my FNAF fanfic and there will be sex eventually, so maybe I’m not the person who should be talking about where that line ought to be drawn. After all, I only seem to be able to recognize it in other people’s work. Fortunately, I know a guy who is capable of pointing the finger at himself and he has graciously agreed to share a few thoughts, although he has asked that I don’t use his real name in this post so as not to have his present writing career associated with his former fanfiction. I respect that, so for the remainder of this post, we’ll call him Nebuchadnezzar. That’s an awesome name and doesn’t get used enough.

Okay, Nebuchadnezzar, take the floor!

I was about twelve when I first got into Harry Potter, around the time The Half-Blood Prince (book) came out. I was not big into fantasy or magic. I wasn’t much of a reader at all (I’m dyslexic). To be honest, I only started reading it because it was all my friends were talking about. I was not a popular kid and to feel excluded from the only people who I felt accepted by made me feel devastated to a degree that only kids can feel. So I begged my mother to buy me the books.

I thought it would be a much harder sell than it was. There was some controversy in our small community at the time over the whole magic=Satan thing, but as I say, I wasn’t much of a reader and the fact that these were books I was actually begging for must have tipped her moral scales. I sat down to read that first book, grimly determined to get through it and find something about it that would allow me to reconnect with my friends. I didn’t really expect to like it. Books were homework to me, a chore. To my complete surprise, I was utterly hooked. I read the whole thing in a single weekend, which for me (dyslexic) was a monumental achievement. I talked about it over meals and in the car. The night I finally finished it, my mother asked me what I was going to do next and I told her I was going to read it again. I heard her talking to my father that night and crying. The next day when I came home from school, I found all the (then) available HP books waiting on the kitchen table. I read them all and for the first time understood all those posters of the kid reading while whole worlds are spinning around his head.

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I was unaware of fanfiction in those days. The frustration of waiting for the next book was something I had never known, but I had no choice but to wait. Remember that while the books were being written, the movies were also being made, so even after I closed the cover on The Deathly Hallows, I still had several years of HP to look forward to. But no new books, no new stories.

I found myself making up new adventures for Harry and his friends, in which they often came to America for vague reasons never fully explained, and over time, I visualized the recurring character of a young boy, raised by Muggles, who falls in with them and soon discovers he is also a powerful wizard, perhaps the most powerful wizard ever, although he can’t control his magic and naturally, Voldemort wants to turn him to the dark side so that he can become the most powerful Death Eater of his army and so on and so on.

I began to tell my friends these stories, usually prefaced by, “I had the weirdest dream last night…” so they wouldn’t think I was sitting around, just obsessing over Harry Potter. Encouraged by my friends, I began to write some of these stories down and then to expand on them. One of my friends showed a story to one of his friends, who told my friend about fanfiction.net, who told me. I had no intention of putting my own stories out there initially, but I was curious to read what other people were doing to Harry and his friends, so I did as suggested and checked it out.

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“Ohhhhh, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found yooooooou!”

In my defense, I would like to remind you that I was fifteen or so at the time and had not come out to anyone (not that I surprised anyone when I did). When it came to sex, I talked myself up around my friends and did some obligatory ogling at the ‘It’ girls in my school, but I knew I was gay and was beginning to be afraid that when I wrote my silly stories about Harry kissing Ginny or Ron kissing Hermione, my friends were going to notice it was always the ‘kissing Harry’ or ‘kissing Ron’ part that I was really focused on. Suddenly here before me was a wealth of unapologetic gayboy HP adventures and other people were reading them and saying things like, “This is great!” instead of homophobic slurs and mockery. I hadn’t exactly fallen out of my HP fixation, but that night, it doubled down hard.

I made a ff.net account that night. I made two, actually. One I could tell my friends about and where I would eventually post all my ‘old’ stories and a handful of new ones, and another secret account where I began to publish what I then considered my ‘real’ stories. I think of them now as my ‘Handjob Harry’ series. No, I will not give you the links.

[pretty sure I’ve read them, Nebs, but you go on–RLee]

For someone without many friends, having even a couple dozen views and a review section full of enthusiastic praise from strangers was a rush. They said they wanted more, so I gave them more. I wrote feverishly. Handjobs turned into blowjobs and eventually turned into my idea of sex.

I quickly became aware of the fanfic writer stereotype as an emo twelve-year-old destined to be a virgin well into his forties, and to prove I was mature enough to be writing mature content, I made sure I wrote like a mature adult. Example: “Fuck, that feels good,” (my OC) moaned as Draco groped his buttocks sensuously. Draco groped harder, grinning, “Fuck yeah you know it does.”

Feel free to cringe.

All in all, I must have written a hundred stories. I took a lot of them down since if anyone ever said anything remotely negative, I took it to mean the story was worthless and deleted it. Since I wrote most of these stories in ff.net and had no other copies, they are now erased from the universe. I’d feel worse about this, but they really were awful. I wish I could bring myself to take the rest down, but as silly as it may sound, they represent me at a time of my life when I sincerely felt as thought I had no representation in the world and no one who understood me as well as my friends in the HP slash-fiction community. In that sense, even though I’ve officially disowned them, there’s still a part of me that loves those silly little stories and hopes somewhere out there, someone read them and saw just a little bit of himself in them.

You asked me to write about adult themes in fanfiction and I realize I’ve put a more positive spin on it than you probably intended.

[I intended you to share your experience and that’s exactly what you did. Thanks, Nebs–RLee]

It may seem hypocritical to say so now, but I think you’re right when you say some stories shouldn’t have the adult themes that are written into them. I’m just not sure it’s a source-issue, as you say. In my opinion, it comes down to the intent of the author. I can’t really regret the sex scenes in my HP fics, as cringey as they are, because they came from a real place. I don’t regret the violence either, because that’s always been very much a part of that universe, even if Rowling chose to tone it out or let it happen off-screen. But the swearing bothers me, because the only purpose it served was to convince the reader that I was an adult and not some teenaged emo edgelord, which of course I was.

There’s your threshold. Sincerity vs. Shock Value. It’s the same as when you talk about the difference between ‘good’ bad movies like Deep Rising and ‘stupid’ bad movies like Human Centipede III. They’re both bad, but one of them is sincerely trying to make a movie and the other one is just trying to get other people to talk about it.

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A big hand for Nebuchadnezzar, everyone! That was awesome!

That does put it in perspective for me. When I look at my early works–Heat and Olivia, especially–I see a writer who was trying too hard to create ‘erotica’ as defined by a third-party. I’m not embarrassed by them, but they’re sure not as good as they could be. After my publisher and I parted ways and I stopped thinking about how many sex scenes I needed to hammer into a book of so many pages, I got much better at telling the story. By the time I arrived at this point in my life, my thinking had evolved. In books as in life, sex is better when you let it happen, not make it happen.

Having said that, I’m aware that the simple fact that there is sex in my present series is not the whole problem. There is a belief in the FNAF fandom, commonly held to be canonical, that the animatronics are possessed by the spirits of murdered children and therefore shipping them is tantamount to pedophilia. And I would have to agree if I believed that to be the case. I don’t. In the games, it is never expressly stated that the animatronics are ‘possessed’ at all. The closest we get to anything of the sort is a mini-game called Give Life that shows some 8-bit blobs (supposedly the dead children) being ‘crowned’ with the heads of animatronics, and another mini-game wherein a pixelated Purple Guy runs from some pixelated ghosts after chopping up the old animatronics.

Now the mini-games throughout the series are not a reliable source of lore, as far as I’m concerned. I view them more as a portrayal of the ‘urban legend’ that has sprung up around Fazbears, but even if they were canon, what do they canonically show? That kids were stuffed into animatronics and that Purps had a major freakout in which he may have seen actual ghosts or only imagined them on account of, you know, being a psychopath who murders children. There is nothing that definitively states the animatronics are haunted by any actual human spirit, let alone a child, but–and here let me emphasize this point–even if they were, it’s been decades. Let me skip ahead a bit and offer up this snippet from Part IV of the series:

***

“But you’re not…I mean…” Horror like nothing she’d ever known—and she’d known so much of it here—swelled up in her throat and came out as a broken, “You’re not kids are you? Are you? Please tell me you’re not a child?”

Foxy snorted through his speakers and folded his arms. “I came alive in ’66, lass. I’m older than ye by a yardarm.”

Relief crashed down like a wave and washed out, leaving her with a small, shaky smile that slowly grew into a blush.

“We don’t know who we used to be,” said Freddy. “I can’t swear we weren’t children when we were taken, but it’s been fifty years since then. Age isn’t something you only have in a body. It’s time and experience…and you aren’t even listening,” he concluded, dropping his plastic eyebrows in a stone-faced scowl.

Ana’s hand fluttered up as if it could rub away the blush she knew she was showing. “I love it when you talk like a pirate,” she mumbled, still smiling that idiot smile.

Foxy snapped his eyepatch down at once. “Arr.”

“Well, how do you know, though?” she asked quickly, turning back to the relative safety of Freddy’s face. “How do you know you were anyone at all? If you don’t remember—”

“Because we know how we were built,” Freddy said, speaking gently, but firmly. “We saw him build others. We saw how they were brought to life. And it took other lives.”

***

In my head-canon, these are not kids. Other fans may not agree with this viewpoint, but I stand by it and moreover, I will continue to stand by it when Bonnie and Ana get around to the hardcore canoodling, if called upon to do so in the comment section. I say this now not because I’m especially sensitive on the subject–I’m not–but simply to show that I have thought about it and it was very much a deliberate part of the writing process.

As for the rest of it, violence was very much a part of the source material, even if it wasn’t graphically portrayed. And believe it or not, as much as my characters swear, they swore a LOT more before I edited. Profanity is like any other word in a novel; it has to earn its place and where it does not set a mood, define a character or advance the plot, I take it out. I’m aware that the darker themes of EIAR, especially those involving the abuse of children, are disturbing to some readers, but I believe they are appropriate to the material and I don’t believe I use them just to get a reaction.

There is a place for adult themes in fanfiction and it’s the same place it occupies in any other genre. Writing is, at its simplest definition, the act of using words to elicit an emotional reaction. Sex, gore, obscenity: writers use these things to provoke a response because they’re easy and effective…kind of like jumpscares in horror movies and games. And just like jumpscares, they can be done right and done wrong. There’s plenty of people out there who don’t think I do it right. That’s fine. The line is deeply personal, especially when it comes to anything that taps into that childhood nostalgia. So I can tell you to approach mature themes judiciously and edit critically, but I can’t promise you won’t still get flamed for it. Does that mean you should stop? No. If you believe in it, you should never stop. Corny, but true. Should you believe that strongly in your 69-chapter Smurfs/Avatar crossover, Big Blue Blood Orgy, guest-starring several pokemon, Sonic the Hedgehog and the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street?

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Where did that even come from? What’s wrong with me?

Yes. If that’s your thing and you are sincerely into that thing, then you write that thing. But then get therapy, because damn, no one should be into that thing.

Serial Saturday Update

Wish me luck, ya’ll! (We’ve established that ya’ll is acceptable, since I live in the Midwest, right?) I signed up (by which I mean my sister, Cris, signed me up and told me afterwards) for the 100 day Author’s Challenge in the hopes that it will give me the competitive streak I need to get Part IV of my FNAF fanfic series finished before Part III concludes. The goal is to write 1000 words each day for 100 days, so I will be adjusting my WIP widget up there in the upper right-hand corner of the screen accordingly. I seriously doubt there’s 100k words left in Part IV, but if not, I’ll get a great head start on Part V! So, once again, wish me luck, ya’ll!

I start Monday, officially, so for tonight, ya’ll (the more I say that, the less confident I am that I’m using it correctly) can support the new chapter of Children of Mammon, up on fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org! I know that a lot of you are probably getting tired of me urging thus-far-disinterested parties to give it a chance, but honestly, every single Saturday, I get messages from readers who finally broke down and started reading, and as long as that keeps happening, I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep saying stuff like, “If you’re still undecided, maybe this excerpt will change your mind!” Because you never know…maybe it will?

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Foxy was made to be a pirate and over the years, he had found that the pirate attitude had a lot of useful applications in his day to day life. For example, a proper pirate never left his cabin without a cutlass on his hip and he didn’t just draw it for a serious fight. Roar through town with your blades out at every opportunity was the pirate way. Can’t catch the waiter’s eye to pay your check? Wave a cutlass. Forgot your keys and the missus locked the door? Open it with your cutlass. Can’t decide whose turn it is to carve the turkey at Thanksgiving? The honor goes to the bloke who brought the cutlass.

In short, the more the enemy saw you as a cutlass-waving brute, the less effectively she was able to defend against the hidden dagger, which in this case was Foxy’s rarely-wielded yet finely-honed power of persuasion. Another duel, one fought with words instead of swords. And if that didn’t work, he’d bring out the swords again. That had been fun.

So Foxy played out his last hours, telling all his old stories and singing all his old songs, while mentally rehearsing quite a different role. At long last, the more conventional fireworks started going off outside, the usual harbinger of the end of Ana’s work-day. This time, she kept going, using up every ray of sunlight while she had it, although she cut back on the hammering.

Restless as he was, Foxy found himself wondering what she looked like up there…sunlight all glowing red and gold in her dark hair…sweat making her skin shiny and her clothes sticky-tight…

It didn’t make the time go by any faster, but it passed a damn sight pleasanter.

The sun went down. The restaurant closed. Foxy stood in the bow of his ship for fifty-eight minutes more and listened to boots thumping back and forth on the roof. At ten, Foxy’s joints unlocked, but Ana, bless her steadfast little heart, kept working, so Foxy settled himself in the bow of his ship to wait.

The silence snuck up on him. It occurred to him only after he’d heard it, or hadn’t heard it, for a while that Ana might be done working at last. Foxy sat up at once, only to settle reluctantly back again. Wouldn’t do to have her walk in and find him listening for her at the door. Disinterest could be a potent lure. He’d learned that watching the Purple Man, but that didn’t make it less true.

And before much longer, the door to the East Hall creaked open.

Foxy rotated an ear in that direction, but didn’t hear Freddy’s footsteps. “WHO GOES THERE?” he called, smiling because he already knew.

“It’s me,” said Ana.

“Expected ye sooner.”

“Oh, am I keeping you up past your bedtime, Captain?”

“Might b-b-be I’m keeping ye up past yers.”

“Let me worry about that. We had a deal, you and me. You owe me some answers. But we need to make it quick,” she said, pulling the curtain open and climbing onto the stage. “Bonnie thinks I’m in the shower. Where are you?”

“On d-d-deck. Come aboard.”

She didn’t move, not right away, but after a moment or two, he heard her mutter, “Better than his cabin,” and then he heard her on the gangplank. Not the thump of her boots, though; the pad-pad-pad of little bare feet. She’d had the shower first, he thought, and turned his head just as she stepped onto the deck, her wet hair hanging loose all down her back and past her hips, wearing a shirt with a bat clutching a bottle of rum on it and some underbritches cut high on the thigh and not a blessed thing more.

“My eyes are up here, Captain,” she said dryly.

“Hold-d-d the rigging, luv, I’m getting there.”