Can we all just keep in mind that I have a dirty mouth and mind? Ok, thanks.
Let's just be honest here.
This all started as a joke.
A big fat funny one that I laughed and laughed and laughed over.
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Red Spark is the jello shot queen. And she rules with an iron fist. I have a beloved black moleskin full of her recipes that I've gotten thoroughly trashed on and have trashed other people on. Those little wiggly devils have a bad reputation and there is nothing I love more than proving people wrong. When I asked Red Spark what she wanted for her birthday, in return for that treasured little notebook, she came at me with guns blazing.
As one of the few people in the world to have read my original fiction, she hit me right where it counted.
She wanted a fanfiction.
A dirty one.
Now, Red is also the sole reason why I started reading fanfiction in the first place. In all honesty, I've read very little of it myself, mostly the basics that would considered required. At that point I didn't understand that there might be rules. That there might be standards or taboos.
I wrote Coupling.
As a great big joke.
I turned dear Bella into a lesbian and that smooth, sexy vampire into a clutz. I made Jasper a graffiti artist and threw down every cliche in book. Unplanned pregnancy, some tropical island, a crazed redhead with a death wish. I researched aspen trees and spray paint. Adoption regulations and emancipation legalities. I got Jasper to paint bikinis on the the girls and Edward to duct tape Jasper to a tree. I sent a pack of rabid bees after our beloved golden couple and pushed them off a cliff. I let Alice climb onto a bed and put on a one-woman show for Jasper. I walked Bella through her first sexual encounters with a guy, after years of girls.
300,000 some words later, and it was twice as long as my legitimate novel.
*headdesk*
Who want's to read Twific anyway? Apparently everyone. I posted 72 chapters to ff.net and in a couple of months, got 300 or so reviews.
--> Floored.
300! Holy shit, I mean, that's a fucking lot, right? I dunno . . . but man did my little heart sort of run around like a hampster on meth for a few weeks. This is what drugs feel like. How does anyone not become an addict?
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About that time, I moved back to my hometown. A little like Forks, but less rainy. Classic Colorado mountain town . . . snows in July . . . you know . . . the usual. Bought a cute house with the Mr. and started hanging out with my little brother a lot more than I have in a long ass time. Too long. Kid is fucking HUGE now, with a mustache and a cute girlfriend and a new hobby.
Climbing rocks.
This hobby came along with friends who were kind of hot and sunburned and talked really funny when they sat in my backyard at the end of the day, drinking beers and chatting about their 'manky' climbs.
Time for a challenge. Coupling averaged somewhere between 2,000 to 7,000 words per chapter. PER CHAPTER. Let's try to do something small this time, girlie. No chapters over 1,000 words, ok Honeybee?
Chalk.
Short and sweet and I didn't give a fuck about what they did in their real life. I didn't want to work out the stupid details about their homes or their cars or their jobs. Fuck that noise, I'm gonna write about rocks. In a thousand words or less.
Bam, that sucker gets 500 reviews after a shout out on the Fictionators, a whole other aspect of the twilight fandom I had no idea even existed up until that point. Then it's up to 600. Then 650. Who are these people? Where do they come from? Again, no idea, but the fact that they aren't required to say anything nice to me, but still take the time to do so was like throwing shots of whiskey down the throat of an alcoholic.
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Then everything changed.
For better? Worse? Maybe some of both?
By this point it was obvious to me that most readers were looking for something they kept referring to as 'lemons.' Wtf? Lemons? As in lemonade? These twi people talk as weird as the rock climbers.
Oh, THAT sort of lemon.
Aha.
Ok, well, I've done the lesbian version. And the fuckhot typical hetero versions. Coughed up a sweet one for Chalk . . . this time, I'm gonna write a threesome.
Only took me 28 chapters, a lot of fucking anxiety, and more than two mental breakdowns to get there.
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The Other Way fucking wrecked me. This is honesty here, people. I have a lot of buried trauma over my time spent in Africa. Too young to control anything and witnessing the horrors of the third world at an age that is supposed to be saved for tender, sugar-coated care. I'v spent lots of time in therapy, even more time trying to deny it ever happened.
Frankly, The Other Way is Alice's story. Not Bella's Not Edward's. Not Jasper's. Alice's. She was by far the character who struggled the most, floundered the furthest and it was only that her head was too torturous of a place to venture into that saved us all from getting that fic from her point of view.
You know when a writer tells you that they had nothing to do with the creation of a story, other than their fingers to a set of keys? That the characters just ate the whole thing up and spit it back out and it ended somewhere far, far away from its original intention?
Yeah, these characters didn't really give a fuck about my opinion.
They took off and I followed. In the end, even I was surprised. They managed to adhere to my one stipulation though, and waltzed themselves right into two of the hottest lemons I have ever written.
I had just posted chapter 27 when the world caught on.
A rec on The Lemonade Stand and I got five hundred reviews in a DAY. I got inducted into facebook groups. I got pats on the back and high fives and then I posted chapter 28, the first of my back-to-back threesomes, and I started getting stones.
But I'm ahead of myself here . . .
I knew it would happen. These people read Twilight, for fuck's sake. I read that book and threw it against the wall. I read it again, and then the next three, and threw all of them against the wall at some point. I hated Bella and Edward sort of creeped me out but I'm married to my high school sweetheart and I'm a sucker for that shit.
No one was expecting this out of me, I hadn't spoken a word of my poly-minded intentions and I knew some of my new readers were bound to freak out.
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That's how I found Hadley.
It was really between her and one other reviewer, two people who consistently left me constructive, thoughtful reviews. Who seemed to understand my language and talked to me about books they loved, all of which I loved too.
I picked Hadley because I love Hemingway.
This is one of those moments that is a perfect example of fate.
On the technical side, Hadley helped me write the end of The Other Way. Lots of deep, analytical phone calls, therapy for both me and my broken characters. There is no way it would have finished as smoothly without her, and now way I would have made it through the hailstorm either.
On the not so technical side, she held my hand while people ranted and raved. I purchased a helmet for myself. Posted the second threesome and it got broken. There were days I talked to her more than my husband.
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What am I even saying here? It's all just a bunch of bad-language rambling that probably comes off just shy of whining.
Again, with the honesty thing - there have been more times than I care to admit that I've seriously considered pulling everything and disappearing. Deleting it all, hunting down those who downloaded it, demanding it back. It's mine, my thoughts and my hurt and frankly, a lot of myself rolled around in a fine dust of fandom. So fine, in fact, that I've taken several stories and changed all the names, altered a few minor details, read them aloud in public.
On a microphone.
No one the wiser.
Am I wasting myself? These ideas, could they put to better use elsewhere? Maybe, but I guess that's the classic problem. Do you leave the fandom for something you think might be better?
What do you do when the magic starts to die a little?
If you're me - you come back around with something so different, no one will recognize you.
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I wrote Slow Pony Home for The Happily Ever After contest.
A fic that I rated T, but only because there was a very vague reference to sex. A fic that centered more on the relationship between a cowboy and a little indian boy, rather than a man an woman. A fic that sat on that list of stories, ignored for three months. Every time someone would guess another title as mine, my heart failed a little bit but you know . . . that's what I intended to do. I intended to lose.
They wanted some hot Edward and Bella action, I gave them the Disney version of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Imagine my flat out fucking amazement when I won something.
A judge's pick, with a perfect score no less, and the fandom proved me wrong. It was kind of nice, really, to be proven wrong . . .
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These days, I'm writing to scare myself.
And yeah, Bite Club scares me, but I love it. It's dirty and raw and unpolished, just the way I like my fics. Some may argue that I've got lots of polish, but that's just good editing.
I don't want pretty, shiny people. I don't want easy. I don't want mindless.
I want reality and reality doesn't always taste good.
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This is me saying that I'm still here. Still writing. Still sucked way too far into something that I never intended to get sucked into and loving more of it than I hate.
Maybe this was just a pep talk to myself, a 'look at how far you've come' retrospective, because Chalk is close to 1,000 and The Other Way just might make it to 2,000 if a few more people pick it up. I might not ever be one of those 10,000 reviews stories, but a couple thousand feels pretty fucking good to me. I'm just as grateful now as I was about that original mind blowing 300. I've met a lot of spectacular people and yeah, some not so awesome ones (I keep trying to remind myself to be honest here) and have made one or two close friends that will have to kill me if they ever want to be fully rid of me.
For every smooth surface, there is a piece of sandpaper and I might be your sandpaper, but it's the fine-grain type.
The one that wears you down slow.
*blows kisses*
*runs away*
