Ah HA!

[blamebrampton]

FANFICCERS!

Worried about lack of reviews?

Sad that everyone is reading everyone who is not you?

Depressed to see teenagers who don't know how to spell frottage and cannot accurately gauge the bendability of the average penis with thousands of ffnet reviews while your finely crafted and beautifully edited masterpieces are lucky to garner 23?

FRET NO LONGER!

THE SECRET IS REVEALED!

''People say it isn't good quality but you have to remember Fifty Shades started as fan fiction and as fan fiction you have to have action,'' Hayward says. ''You have to have a sex scene in every chapter because that's how you get your reviews. The amount of people who review per chapter shows popularity, that's how your ratings get up. In fan fiction every chapter has to give you something to keep you reading it.''
(From an SMH interview with Amanda Hayward, the really rather brilliant publisher of the not as brilliant book.)

So there you go! You lot who've been telling me to porn it up were right all along! (I mean, obviously I'm not going to, but that's for the best. The Bad Sex Awards longlist is already inches thick.)

I thoroughly recommend the article, which is interesting and respectfully written, without being actually nice about bad writing. It includes this gem from The London Review of Books' Andrew O'Hagan, which I had previously missed: ''It's not that Fifty Shades of Grey and E.L. James's other tie-me-up-tie-me-down spankbusters read as if feminism never happened: they read as if women never even got the vote.''

Comments

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Nah, I don't think it's a dumbass position. And it's very minimally entitled.

'Entitled' has become a really bullshit term in the hands of the internetarati, because EVERYONE actually IS entitled: it's the human condition. And a lot of it is perfectly reasonable. I am entitled to ride my bike without getting run over, children are entitled to not know things until someone teaches them, writers actually ARE entitled to hope there might be some sort of engagement with their work.

It's not an outrageous position to say: 'Here are 30,000 words I slaved over, it would be lovely if you could respond with perhaps 30 if you really enjoyed them.' Only on the internet would it be suggested that you're somehow a bad person for thinking that's reasonable.

And while one could advance the position that few people respond to professional writers, that would be false, because reviews and word of mouth are major publicity avenues for published fic, the writers of which are also paid. For fanfic writers, reviews are not only reviews, they are also our word of mouth and our payment.

So I think that your position is perfectly valid! I occasionally feel the same way, before I remind myself that they are obviously just too awed by my genius. Rampant egotism can make life better!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

I seriously wondered now if they haven't come up with a way to transplant that egotism but I also want the energy and talent and charm and what not. Keith Richards survived with other peoples blood, why can't I have some of your stem cells? Brain matter? I don't know what, infiltrate me, this should be possible by now!

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

I totally have spare ego! You could definitely have some.

I'm very lucky in that I was raised by bonkers people who had a lot of very correct ideas. I'll never forget being a young girl the year after Dad died and just being in a miserable funk and moaning bitterly about something inconsequential and saying 'It's no wonder people just kill themselves!' (which was a melodramatic turn of phrase, not any sort of intention) and my grandmother saying, 'I always wondered about that, because those people are almost never the problem. Surely the better plan would be to murder the people who ARE the problem, and then you'd have a few years in a nice psychiatric asylum to sort everything out, come out feeling much better and with one less evil bastard in the world?'

Alas, my charm mostly works on old men with dogs or large vegetables, and you would end up rather short!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

Love your family stories.

*snicker* okay, not quite my target group, but considering the guys I like ARE considered old men coughtumblrcough and I can choose between dogs or large vegetables (was that a euphemism) and I already don't feel tall - let the transfusion commence.