A community for fannish manifestos (This thing is AMAZING. Here's why.)

So I'm pretty amped about this current fanfiction project I'm working on. I've been wanting to write an Expanse novella (or several, but one to start) ever since I finished reading the series and the authors said they didn't plan to write any more in that universe. The Expanse fandom really isn't a great hub of creative fanwork, especially the book fandom. I'm one of the only people I'm aware of that has done fanart for the final three books, which never got adapted for television. It kind of drives me crazy that there is so much free real estate that nobody is using.

For those unfamiliar with the books, there are nine main books, which are all sprawling multi-POV epics, and then there are ten novellas. You don't have to read the novellas to enjoy the main series, but each one provides some insight into characters, places, and events that are mentioned in the main books but never get their day in the limelight. The authors also do a thing where they like to use each book and novella to dabble in different genres, even if they are all first and foremost scifi/space opera. So for example, Leviathan Falls is a detective story, Caliban's War is a spy thriller, the novella Strange Dogs is more horror with inspiration taken from Pet Sematary. But they all take place in the same universe and share the same major thematic throughlines, just exploring them from different angles.

So there is a shit ton of opportunity to create original flavor fan novellas that explore a million different things from a trillion different angles, but nobody is fucking doing it! So I decided I would do it. Well, I said I would over a year ago when I first finished the series, but until recently, all I had was a bunch of manic handwritten brainstorming scrawls on my iPad and a list of things I wanted to see novellas about that I posted on Tumblr (I'm still mad that my girl Elsa Singh never got to star in her own novella - hopefully I'll get to that one next. I bet she grows up to be a pistol.)

So recently, I decided to revisit some of my old scrawlings and started roughly developing one of the ideas. I had a title, I had a fuck ton of groundwork laid for character backstory and motivations, and I had a number of scenes completely outlined. But it wasn't coming together. Even when I found my thematic linchpin, it still felt like it was in danger of being more of a loosely related series of vignettes than a story with a proper arc (I have problems with plot. We've talked about this).

And then, like getting hit by a bolt of lightning from the muses, a whole new idea popped into my head. Initially, it was going to be a companion piece to the one I was already working on. But then I started thinking that it would make more sense to take the most important bits of the old story and integrate them into the new one. So the new story grew to encompass the heart of the old one. At first, I thought the new story would be a cinch. "It came to me fully formed," I said. "I can probably write it in one sitting," I said.

Well, friends. That did not last long. The story was originally conceptualized as a relatively contemplative-albeit-melancholy psychological drama that mostly consisted of characters discussing metaphysics and existentialism while working through some ambiguously spec-fic psychological phenomena. This was more or less in the same vein as my original short story Metanoia With a Dead Star, which also served as the basis for a play I wrote called Open Sky. So I was like, "Okay, I've written variations on this same story before, but not in this fandom, so it's fine." Then I started developing the story more, and psychological drama quickly evolved into psychological thriller. Then, it grew some real teeth, and now it's full-blown psychological horror. So I guess that's the genre I'm dabbling in here. Really picking up that thread from Leviathan Falls and running straight to Hell with it.

So what originally started as something I thought I would be able to potentially write in one sitting, which would max out around 10k words, has undergone a complete transformation into a very thematically ambitious, very technically challenging piece that is probably looking down the barrel of 40k words at this point if the outline is anything to go by. One particular section also going to require me to engage in some hardcore typesetting fuckery in the vein of House of Leaves, so I also not only have to figure out exactly what I'm going to do there to get it just right for conveying what I need it to, but I will also have to figure out how to translate that over to sites like AO3 that don't support the full range of formatting I need. I may have to rely on using a vector graphic for that entire scene instead of text, which means also figuring out how to do it in a way that doesn't totally break the flow (although that is kind of the point of the scene so maybe that's okay).

Update: it looks like I will probably be using LaTeX to write the whole thing. I will probably have to use an image for this poarticular chapter on AO3 while also providing a link to the externally hosted LaTeX PDF document to make it more accessible for folks who are willing to go offsite to engage with my intended formatting, or who might be reading on phones, or who want to highlight or copy-paste particular portions of garbled text for more clarity. The expectation that readers may try to decipher the more difficult-to-read sections is part of the metatextual goals of the story, so it's critical that I give them the option to digitally interface with the text so if they so choose. I also want to make sure there is full accessibility for people with dyslexia and other visual difficulties to get the intended surface-level experience without having to provide a completely detangled version of the text, which would defeat the purpose in a lot of ways. So maximum flexibility for the reader to make their own choice to plop down anywhere along the spectrum of "There's no way I'm reading that" and just taking in the overall visual impression before moving on, to "I'm going to sit with this for hours and play with it in my word processor and online text generators until I've got all the puzzle pieces lying face-up and then I'm going to piece them together."

Regardless, I am actually super amped about this story. I think, if I can pull it off, it will probably be the best thing I've ever written. It has an actual fucking plot, for starters. Like a full arc. It fits the five-step story structure to a tee and the climactic scene I've arrived at is already partially written and has honestly been an absolute ball to write so far. I'm also doing both my favorite fanfic shticks, which are (1) taking a very minor character and giving them a whole story, and (2) taking a more prominent character that people don't fucking appreciate enough and using the story as vehicle for my manifesto about why they should be more fucking appreciated. A few of the people I've talked to IRL about this story have said that I should try reworking it into an original story instead, both because there is not much of an audience for fanfiction in this particular fandom and because it has a lot of thematic potential to stand on its own. However, it is extremely in dialogue with the source material in a way that I am neither sure I can extricate from it nor particularly want to. I can always come back at a later date and adapt it into something original, but honestly I just enjoy the act of writing something that is in conversation with something else, especially when the themes resonate with me so hard. At this stage, I am very much writing for me. I'm hoping a few fandom folks who match my freak will be here for it, but first and foremost, I'm just enjoying the feeling of having such a clear creative vision after not writing much of anything for two years, and I just want to follow where the muse is leading m and take simple joy in the act of creation and telling the story I have to tell, without worrying about whether or not anyone is going to read it. My main focus is making sure that my vision comes across the way I want it to for anyone who does read it.

I also had a chuckle looking back at my pinned post where I answered the question what I write about with "Existential stuff. Sad stuff. Difficult stuff. Bittersweet stuff. Fucked up stuff. How to go on existing in a world that's full of horrors. People dealing with (or not dealing with) the darkness inside themselves. People who become better. People who become worse. People who find connection with each other. People who try and fail. People who fall into dark pits and climb back out of them, and people who fall in and never get out. Understanding them. Understanding the world we live in. Bearing witness. Appreciating beauty. Coming to terms. Finding peace. Making a path for oneself." Because I think this story might hit every single one of those, and I wrote that list long before this idea was a twinkle in my eye. Ha. There's also a shit ton of stuff about Jungian psychology, which is precisely my brand of bullshit. I like that I am writing something that is really trying to approximate original flavor and is still so quintessentially mine that nobody else would write it if I didn't, not even the original authors.

I also did the thing I always do when I'm writing something, which is make a playlist to help me set my atmosphere. I keep a collection of all my story playlists. The playlist I made when I wrote my fucked up Hojo fanfic Possession was probably my old favorite, but this one might be my new favorite because some of these songs work so well it's not even funny. Even if you're not in the fandom and have no interest in my story, feel free to take a peek if you are a fan of industrial, darkwave, grunge, and/or dark acoustic folk. If this is your jam, then hey, maybe you'll also be into what I'm cooking up over here, even if you are going in fandom-blind.