Shipping forecast

I can tolerate shipping fictional characters in any show or media you love, it's fine, it's fun to make jokes about it. But when you start shipping real people, and doing fan fiction about them, I really can't abide you feeling justified in it when said people ask you to stop. While we're at it, if you love an author and they tell you to please stop doing fan fiction, fucking stop. You're being abusive and disrespectful by defying them, they don't want to read your version of their work, I find it horribly tacky that you would send it to them, I don't care if you have fans of your own who told you to do it, or to publish it. Stop. You're riding a legal line and you should be thankful your favourite author is only asking you to literally CEASE and DESIST without LEGAL RAMIFICATIONS. Because you can get A REAL LETTER FROM A REAL LAWYER IF YOU DO NOT DESIST. You are LUCKY to be AVOIDING A COURT ROOM. And while you're at it, RESPECT THEIR DISTASTE OF IT. You aren't being fair, you are intruding where you're not welcome and again, you should be thankful for the polite request to stop. Stop attacking authors for being against fan fiction. Please. They have every right to be offended by it. You've been give so much leeway to keep doing this as long as you're not profiting from it. It doesn't make it right by everyone's standards. People might think you're better than them, it's still not your idea. It's not your work. It still baffles me if you think you're that good a writer, make your own stuff. If you're really that good, why are you using someone else's material? I couldn't have any pride in it. I like making up my own shit. I don't need to steal it from other people, there's nothing in it for me. (I always get told most Star Wars extended universe books are essentially fan fiction. If you've been commissioned by the creator/production company etc to do it, and given access to series bibles or material, it's not the same thing. It's the closest you get to legal fan fic, it's akin to ghost writing for a series like Babysitters Club. If you are asked to do this, then it's been legally sanctioned and you're allowed some respect for it, if it's good. And some of it isn't.) Also, someone mentioned film novelisations aren't a thing now, and yeah, it kinda sucks when they were huge in the 90s. These can be based on previous drafts of scripts, they can be very different to the film, it's a cash in. But it's not fan fiction. It's legally sanctioned movie tie-in merchandise and it used to sell very well.

I only found out the other day the piece of shit that was birthed out of the abortion of a book turned out to be less amended than I thought. There were direct comparisons that weren't altered out of sheer laziness, added with the rush to get this out so they couldn't miss the window of opportunity. I could hear the saltiness in the person who called into the podcast I heard the other day, that they had to explain to the host it was absolutely lifted and should've been struck down for being practically identical. It should've been stopped. I fucking hate the original author rolled over on this and gave the other cunt a pass, so that cunt could GO ON TO SLAP OTHER FAN FICTION WRITERS FOR STEALING THEIR SHIT. You cannot go break into someone's house, actually steal something then cry foul when someone else steals it from you. It wasn't yours in the first place. I will never not feel this way about anyone who bitches about their literal fan fiction being stolen.

But I digress. I've come across a few instances of fans doing this to real people and hoping the leads of a show, or two hosts of a YouTube channel, might actually at the least have sex, and these people had to respectfully ask the fans to stop to stop. They had family members who might come across it, it made them uncomfortable. But then Tumblr comes along, has a big cry because you're ruining the fun for them, and since they have the numbers and the influence, much like Goodreads reviewers, they can ruin you in return. They kick up the biggest collective stink, threaten the very thing they love, and the people behind it have to capitulate it to avoid bad publicity. You are not a fan of something if you are willing to destroy it when it doesn't fulfill this emotional deficit in your life. No singer owes you a signature (I've met terrible fans of other things). No author owes you approval of your fan fiction.

Again, I'm blessed to have missed of all this because I was too old for Tumblr by then. Finding out there were fandoms that were practically stalking the cast members and casting aspersions and making up crazy bullshit that even William Shatner cannot abide, I have to agree it seems very distasteful. I may as well shoot myself in the foot and say I don't understand fandoms and never will, and in many ways I assuage my lack of success reminding myself I don't have rabid fans to deal with or disappoint. I sincerely can live with some reviews on my stuff, I don't have to fret about my online interactions while I don't have a money-hungry publisher forcing me to do my own marketing. I can't cope with it for any reason. My gripe will always be with the lack of professionalism I had with my arrangement and the poor presentation of my work. That was it. I would've been fine with no success had I had something professional to show for it.

People don't like it when you act with hostility to the fandom behaviour, if you're not okay with it, you get attacked, and I don't find that particularly fair. Fans of anything should show respect, to each other and the person they're a fan of. I get Shatner's a piece of shit person, but I don't really agree with the principle of shipping. I can see why people get weirded out by the twincest/incest crowd who ship related characters. You shouldn't sic one fandom on another either. Which again makes me sincerely grateful I don't have an online presence. I worry this blog and my associate blogs might have to be taken offline if I did suddenly get attention and people tracked me here. I already spent a year removing posts due to another personal issue. The stance apparently got messy over this instance I'm finding out about now, and dragged the free speech argument into the mix. I get a grimace finding this stuff out, I get verbally aggressive and have nobody to vent to, so here I am at 9:30 pm on a Thursday screaming into the void yet again. People shipping One Direction members made them unhappy, it even led to someone thinking the old Apple logo (the rainbow Apple fans like me hold precious) was an indication one member was, in fact, gay. It's depressing to think people who supposedly love these celebrities would be so destructive with their own conspiracies and hopes. Why would you get so fucking angry and toxic about two people you don't personally not being together? People you don't even have a parasocial relationship with, like you might do with a YouTuber. You can think of all this, and yes, you can write it down and keep it to yourself. I will never tell you to stop writing fan fiction, or your fantasy scenarios, I get that part of it, I sincerely do and I don't believe in thought policing. I'm asking you to keep it to your fucking self. Don't post it online, share it privately if you must, I'll draw the line at a secure server but you risk it being leaked, so just don't put it out there. And getting hostile and affecting other people's lives because two real people aren't fucking in real life is the major reason people are hating on you. You're making your fandom look bad. You don't even have respect for your fellow fans. What's wrong with you, really? Seeing people in these fandoms get so indignant about the backlash and criticism they receive over their weird and sometimes disgusting behaviour. Seeing them double down on their stance after polite requests to stop incense me. I am autistic, it is an injustice you are displaying to me, and I will get violently angry.

I also want to bitch about the author of Outlander being able to share her stuff online and still have it published. I can't remember if she was established, and maybe this was a long time ago, but she had an online presence early on. Another thing they warn you about is avoiding putting stuff online as a publisher won't want it, it's previously published, yet the amount of shit that is posted and does get published again contradicts this golden rule I had to abide by. I argued for a short to get picked up by a competition in light of this, I didn't think it was fair to disqualify it. Meanwhile, Wattpad gets away with this shit. It became a vehicle for bullshit to get made. I am so fundamentally tired of hearing of success stories coming off the back of a stack of broken rules for the sake of profit. You can all look the other way if millions are on the line, they make exceptions for these assholes as long as the cash is good. You can't tell me to keep going when this discouraging shit keeps happening. Hell, they made a movie off a book that didn't even really exist, and asked another author to write it then made a false persona for them and didn't publish the book for months after its release date. Most of the publicity existed around the anonymity of the author, who was discovered anyway despite the pen name. The gamification of the publishing system is real. The only way you fuck up is by writing fake bad reviews for your friends' books and get caught doing it, then you lose your agent and lucrative deal. (Apparently, this was a bunch of cosplayers or people who again had some kind of established online presence which included fans, I think. I won't go looking for details since it made me livid hearing about it). But even then, those deriding you would've forgiven you if you'd just stuck to giving yourself fake positive reviews. Apparently that's still acceptable.

Go away. I'm done. 

Anyway, the weird thing is celebrities who write books know they probably won't do that well and still take a shot at selling several thousand copies, they accept their fanbase might be relatively small and the results smaller. It doesn't seem to make them any less hesitant to do it, everyone just seems to want to do a book these days, and I don't fucking get it. Writing sucks when there's facets like this attached to it.

Having now watched Neon Genesis Evangelion through to the end and reading about how fans hated the creator's original ending enough to want him dead, which made him understandably suicidal, I think I've finally hit my limit with these so-called fans. That's the essence of a real toxic fan base. It's not so much those who go on the attack in defense of the creator - and I'm not excusing it, it's bad - it's turning on the creator and holding all your disappointment against them, even if you were "only kidding". You meant it to some degree, and if you love a piece of art that much you're willing to see its creator suffer when you think they've sullied it some way, you need to reevaluate your entire fucking existence. Seriously. Go to fucking bed. Leave these people alone. If you have no fucking respect for creators when you yourself either create nothing but hate or some derivative piece of art in response, you have no right to happiness. You don't deserve these people making anything for you. You have to respect the artist you claim to love, whether they do something you hate or not. They're going to fucking disappoint you at some point, they're going to deviate from your lofty expectations. They're going to fail. What the fuck have you done in your life that gives you the fucking right to behave this entitled? You haven't done shit. Unless you can demonstrate some fucking creativity of your own, fuck off with this attitude. I don't have fans and thank fuck I don't, I can't live in a world where people like you exist and this is your baby response to not getting what you wanted. Grow the fuck up. Artists don't owe you perfection you can simply stop paying attention to them. We carry on, regardless. You want to think we can't exist without you but we carry on, regardless. We create because it's what we're meant to do. We carry on, regardless. I wish I could say the internet birthed this bullshit but it didn't, artists' lives have been threatened for centuries, the internet just makes that vitriol plainer to the creators. Go out and make something else, if you can. You might then realise it's not that fucking easy.

Maybe I've gone mad again

I had a huge epiphany this morning too after finding out the birth scene in the other series is graphic and traumatic, and I had that publisher telling me not to mark my book as YA because of a traumatic birth scene. I was insulted once I realised this other one has actually traumatised younger girls into not giving birth, and you want to call my scene traumatic? Everything in those other books is horrific, it was translated into the movies, my book is nothing compared to this. I'm pretty sure there's a child abduction scene as well. The publisher did say they would find it harder to market to a younger audience, I read over the email and I sort of get where they're coming from but they also said they weren't pivoting to that genre at the time anyway, they may have done since, (they have). I guess I would've had to wait ages for them to reconsider it, which would've kept me from doing my own stuff. I keep reminding myself there was nothing to suggest it wouldn't be changed in some way and I have no patience to fix whatever they thought was wrong with it, I just can't believe they had no idea that one of the highest selling YA series was incredibly graphic compared to what I wrote, and that'd be impossible to pitch it to the same audience. I can't be bothered changing my other books either. They seem to have pretty good graphic artists for their covers but I have no idea if they're actually selling well, and it is still a vehicle for one person's books who's decided to give other people a leg-up. Now I'm stupidly considering if I can give them something else without redoing too much of anything I've already got, because I stupidly feel like I have an in-road with them now.

So this has stupidly lit a tiny fire under my butt and I'm looking through my uni work and horribly old stuff looking for shit I can fix up and send to these people should they open again for submissions. And now I'm getting fixated on it. I found a short film I wrote about the Virgin Mary meeting a dead rape victim and trying to advocate for her not being killed. It was weird, I can't even tell you what mark I got unless it's in with my other stuff. I've still got the treatment from third year that was based on an idea I wrote in an English exam but I haven't any motivation to actually work on it. I have to remember how stressful it was waiting for responses, then going through the process again. They need at least 60000 so I'm not willing to tack on another 10 to something I did recently, particularly when I was going to take some lurid shit out of it. I guess I could fuck about with it more, I don't fucking know. Plus it'll be yet another thing I lock myself out of and I'm not willing to do that. It's why I'd rather use something old than something newer. Starting over from scratch just feels like too much to ask of myself right now. There's only one thing I could maybe use but if I'm really going to pull a novel out of my ass like I did last time just to placate myself, I have to be willing to put up with all the pain and sense of pointlessness when I realise it's a waste of time to even try. I don't even know if the response I got was genuinely blowing smoke up my ass or if it was sincere. I only know it came from someone who hated getting rejected so he decided to go it alone and do it himself, so to speak, and do I really want to work with another person like that. The only difference was, I wasn't aware of my old publisher doing her own shit she wanted to release. My biggest achievement was technically finishing a very old thing I couldn't do in high school which had a scene I'd been playing in my head for over two decades, and I somehow got it on paper after all that time. Now and then I manage to squish a couple of random ideas into one story and make that work. Do I genuinely have it in me to do this all over again? I could be really cheeky and send them something see if they want more then write it. I'm just not in the mood to try. They also still only want commercial adult fiction, not YA. So I have to wonder how much they're promoting the YA books they did publish.

I wouldn't be sitting here reconsidering it if my first go around had just looked more professional. It's inordinately frustrating to have gone through that fucking stress to have it end up an embarrassment and nothing worth my own sense of pride. I can only be thankful I got them back at all.

I should note here as I've not done that yet, that I recently agreed to help a kid get their story published because it seems like a really good idea worth telling and that her dad didn't have to spend an arm and a leg to make it happen. I've put the thought on the backburner now because it is entirely dependent on if she can write this, it's really cool she can even be open about it with her own parents as opposed to me, who still wishes I hid all this from everyone and just written for some trashy series in secret. Telling this person I could help also meant at least exposing my children's book, I'm very against exposing my other stuff, even the traditional books, I'm not thrilled with promoting them. My only other option is to find someone who can help me promote what I have, but I don't know if the job place I'm seeing tomorrow can put me anywhere I might get some help or at least meet people. I'm not opposed to lending what I know to some local organisation that works with kids, it wouldn't totally suck for me to do this, I used to be against it, but now I don't care as much anymore. I'm like, fuck it, I have nothing better to do I'm just that desperate to never work in an office again I'll do anything to avoid it. I'm going to have to be as firm as possible about this, I'm going to make it clear I simply can't apply for any admin assistant role available right now, and if I do get back into data entry, it'd have to be somewhere that doesn't enforce militant KPIs or at the least just leaves me to do the job without micromanaging me. I don't trust those places would be as kind about my errors, it's what made my old job feel safer even if it was driving me insane, I wasn't in trouble it was simply annoying having to account for every mistake.