InsaneJournal

Current mood:	accomplished
Entry tags:	journal: policy, meta, random

All good things start slow

The title of this post is basically the law of my life, just now. It’s taken a while for me to realise it (no surprise there), but there it is. My best decisions are ones that I make over and over and over again, after hours of thought. I prod and adjust and flounce away and flounce back and think things over until I’m sick of them. Then I make a decision, and keep on prodding at it to see if it holds up.

My decision to write fanfiction has held up for the last two or three years. It still holds.

My decision to build a personal archive has held up for the last year or eight :D. It still holds (and, if you’re not put off by works in progress, you can take a peep here to see how it’s holding).

My decision to write in the A Surreal Tale universe— for it is a universe now— has held up for the last two years. It still holds.

You’ve heard about those decisions a lot over the last year, if you’ve followed me on LJ or kept track of my changing profile at FF.net. One decision you haven’t heard much about, though, is my decision to be in HP fandom.

You see, I thought I didn’t have to make that decision. I thought I could write a little removed from canon. I thought I had little or no respect for how things have gone down in the books or in the movies, and so I didn’t want to poke and prod at my decision to stay in HP fandom. For me, being part of a fandom is most about writing stories in the fandom. On some level, I don’t count myself part of Vorkosigan fandom, because I don’t write anything in that fandom. I can read all I like there, but don’t feel I’ve really thrown down there until I’ve written something. Writing is how I get close to a subject. Writing is an innate part of my decision-making process. Writing is how I answer my own questions about a canon, and until I care enough about a canon to ask questions and want to answer them for myself, I don’t really feel part of it, even if I enjoy the fic.

Sometime in the last two weeks, I just realised that I do care about the connection I have to HP canon. I’ll always love the first three or four books. I’ll probably buy the HP encyclopaedia when it comes out, no matter how loudly I’ll mutter about what decisions JKR makes next. And I’ll shamelessly borrow the parts of her interviews that intrigue me, just like I shamelessly borrow everything else. I’ll probably always care more about my own story— my own answers to questions about canon— but I won’t forget what I’m building on.

So, my decision to be part of HP fandom has held up since I picked up the first book, and got lost. It’s been closely questioned, ignored, avoided, prodded with sharp sticks, and slowly backed away from. It still holds.

And writing the AST universe as part of the larger HP universe…it’s consciously rearing up its head for the first time. It’s an old, half-made decision. But I hope it holds.

As always, this entry is all about how I make sense of things. I don’t doubt that other ways of participating in fandom exist, and agree that there’s more than fifty ways of measuring when you become a fan of something. But I’ll always think the way that matters most for measuring yourself is the one that you use. A broad standard that makes sense for everyone else may not makes sense for you, so.