Dear Fandom Friends

[seekingferret]

naraht and I have been discussing a fanfic meta challenge to write forewords for other peoples' fic, analogous to the way a novel might open with a foreword by an editor or fellow author or fan.

Forewords can serve a lot of functions for a story. They can introduce a new reader to the story, providing context or explaining why the reader should even bother. They can offer critical insight into parts of the story that prime the reader's expectations in a particular way. There might be biographical or historical information a reader might want to know.

I think forewords for fic is a really neat idea and I'd love to see the kind of things that could be written. I'm sure it would introduce me to stories I otherwise wouldn't read or wouldn't understand if I read. And it seems like a really fun way to recognize stories that have affected us.

Where we're stuck at the moment is on how to structure the challenge. My first impulse was to a Remix-style exchange where authors of fic offer their whole body of work and are matched to write a foreword for a story by another offer. The advantages of this are that it guarantees that someone will write a foreword for one of your stories, which is a nice inducement to participate, and it takes some of the decision-making out by narrowing down your field of choices. The major downside is that if you get a bad match I'm not sure how to deal with it. I think it's harder to write a critical essay on a story you're not interested in than it is to write a remix of a story you're not interested in, because with the remix you can always add more of your own fiction. I think exchanges also skew the field away from authors who aren't comfortable writing meta and meta writers who aren't comfortable writing fic. This leads to making it a challenge instead of an exchange, to open up the field of eligible participants.

One thing that Remix-style exchanges also short-circuit is the permission aspect. I wouldn't want to run this without getting author permission for their stories to be written about, but if we don't do it exchange-style, the challenge will have to involve writers in some fashion soliciting fic authors' permission in some fashion. Either we have to solicit blanket permission ahead of time from anyone who wants their stories to be eligible, which I'm hesitant to do because whenever that kind of challenge happens I'm always reluctant to surrender blanket permission, and also because I haven't seen a challenge that did a good job of making it easy for potential participants to browse the eligible authors' stories, or perhaps more pertinently, motivating participants to brose the eligible authors' stories. Or we have to provide resources to make it as painless as possible to individually ask authors for permission. I was thinking that we could provide a form letter to participants to send to authors, so all they'd have to do is copy/paste and fill in a few blanks with details about the story. Alternately, maybe mods could assume the responsibility of contacting authors. From a Ferret's Weird Issues point of view, I would have a lot easier time contacting random authors with my mod hat on than I would as just a random author. In general I don't have the same social anxiety when it comes to making phone calls for professional reasons that I do with potentially touchy personal phone calls. Is that true of other people?

Anyway, I want to gauge interest in this and see if you folk have suggestions about how to run it.

Comments

[havocthecat]

Hrm. The problem with running it Remix-style is this: What if you're assigned to write a foreword for someone who mostly (or only) writes a pairing you can't stand? Because if I signed up and got stuck with an author who not only writes a pairing I despise, but who actively hates the pairings I like, that would be a problem for me. I wouldn't want to be that person who writes a mean foreword.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, that's my thing too. It seems to me that writing a mean foreword is a lot worse than writing an ill-fitting remix. Poor matches are a problem with every exchange, but they seem like a deal-killer to me for something like this.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, at least with a remix you can focus on a different pairing and ignore the original pairing. With a foreword, it's hard to do that.