how do I shot fandom?

[my_daroga]

I feel like I'm in a swirl of feelings and circumstances that don't have a lot of room for one another. On the one hand, I am swamped in real life generally, mostly because I am finally getting opportunities to do things and saying "no" to those feels like a betrayal of the nearly forty years I spent, you know, NOT getting to do the things. (Or really, rather, building towards those things or not getting to do them enough, etc.)

So I'm working and I have friends I don't see as much as I ought and I have theater and podcast recordings and skating lessons and all that. At the same time, having attended Left Coast Sherlock Symposium and then this past weekend KiScon, I want to get caught up in fandom again and just don't know how. I don't know where it is and when I do find pockets of it they seem unsuitable or unnavigable. I want to write but I feel I have forgotten how to produce, or maybe I've forgotten how to create time in my life where production of that sort is possible.

I've also got an ex-coworker texting me her feelings about Spike since she's watching Buffy for the first time, so hello again Spike feelings.

So yeah. I still have all these thoughts and feelings flowing around and through me, and I don't know what to do with them because not only are they diffuse they are undirected and in addition, the logistics of my daily life are, you know. Compromised, time-wise.

I don't know why I'm posting all of this here, except to try to kickstart myself into figuring this out. If I want to write this fic about Kirk, I should do it. If I want to be involved in fandom, I should find it and stop whining about it not being what I want. It's just hard to know where to start when it feels like "starting over" in an arena that used to feel so organic and natural.

Comments

[stultiloquentia]

Wow, this is relatable. It's so weird and sometimes hard, having this quality (fannishness) that exists in you always, and wants and needs to play, even when everything else in your life is running full throttle.

My successes definitely have cycles, and I've felt lost and lonely on different platforms for years at a time, and then found community again by accident. After putting up with Tumblr for two fandoms in a row, my latest has an amazing DW presence. I didn't write a word of fiction in over a year, and this week I put down 3k. Just knowing the infrastructure -- the comms and the fests and the audience -- exists is so inspiring.

But when I was yammering about Jane Austen, I didn't feel like part of a fandom, even though a (weird, aggressively heteronormative) JA fandom certainly exists on message boards in other places. I just yelled on my blog, and a few nice people commented, and that was pretty fun, too, just with a slightly more "for my own sake" feel to it.

[sl_walker]

You should do it! Feel free to cross-post it to Ad Astra, too. Site's been a bit of a ghost town, we could use new posters. XD

http://www.adastrafanfic.com/

I mean, at the moment, I am working on Star Wars rare pairs exchange, but I am also writing a story that might end up being epic and that all of two people will read.

I do get the whole time-balance issue. But if you want to write that story, do it. Write it short. Or long. Or in one paragraph at a time pieces. I've been pushing to do two hundred words a day; it adds up. And it might help to get some of the thoughts out of the head and onto the page.