About a dude

Here's me on the Twitter

Here's me Facebooking

Here's the ffn profile page

Here's me with a fish

 

Here's a story about how a guy ended up writing Twilight fanfiction:

At first, I laughed at fanfiction. I’m a guy. Of course I laughed. And Twilight fanfiction? Bwahaha.

My wife, known around these parts as MazzyStarla, discovered fic the same way most of you did, I’m guessing. She’d read the Twilight books, saw the movies, and stumbled across something on Twitter. Wham. Her life changed.

She’d tell me about this stuff. CEO Edward, Dominant Edward, Professor Edward. She’d swoon.

I’d roll my eyes.

She got into Twilight role playing on Twitter. She made lots of friends.

I kept rolling my eyes.

And then? Well then I looked at this role-playing thing. Hmm. Interesting. I gave it a shot because I was bored. I’m a writer. Like, I get paid to write stories. That’s my job. They’re non-fiction, though, the stories I get paid for. Fun, but not fulfilling.

I’d always wanted to write fiction, but I could never get started. In RP, though, I ended up writing a 30,000-word, totally fictional story one tweet at a time. I fucking loved it.

After that, I started writing some short fiction. I got some of it published. I was proud of myself. I’d proved something.

Nobody noticed.

Meanwhile, 50 Shades had blown up the old world and created a new one. Whether or not you liked that book, or the fic it came from, or what your opinion is of the P2P thing, the truth is 50 changed everything. People were not so much taking fanfic seriously or anything, but they weren’t outright dismissing it anymore, either.

A year went by. Mazzy and I both stopped the role-playing. But Mazzy kept reading fic. I read some, too. Most of it bored me. Too much sex, not enough plot.

But some of it? Some of it rocked my world. Why aren’t these people published?

Then Mazzy, who is not a writer, wanted to write some fic. I said I’d be her beta. Fix the commas and whatnot.

Holy crap, y’all. She is goooooood. This inspired me. I wanted to give it a shot.

Only problem? I didn’t know a whole lot about Twilight. So I watched the movies. Read the books. I skipped all the Jacob parts because, seriously? What a dumb subplot. Having that dork around really weakens the love story.

I was all meh, frankly, about the whole thing though. But I saw potential. I saw a story about a dark, self-hating older vampire who runs into a beautiful young woman who can’t help but fall in love with him.

Ding!

There’s your idea. So while I thought about this, I entered an angst contest. I didn’t do very well, but I liked the story I wrote. Then I wrote a crackfic, because I love crazy-assed shit.

People reviewed, and people were nice. I got on Twitter. People were really awesome. Way more awesomerer than on my real-life Twitter, where I’m just another unpublished writer.

So thus inspired, I wrote chapter one of The Man in the Long Black Coat.

Y’all: The reviews killed me. Killed me dead. The good dead.

So I kept going. I hit 1,000 reviews. I won Fic of the Week on The Lemonade Stand. My story was a fucking clue on TwiFicTrivia. No lie, folks. That was the highlight so far.

So now I’m going to keep going. I’m going to finish Black Coat, and I’m going to keep mapping out my next fic, which will be ... different. Black Coat is canon-ish. It follows most of the Twilight rules. It sticks to most of the basic characteristics. My next one won’t. It’ll have more traditional vampires. It will still have people named Edward and Bella, but they won’t be like the people from the books. They’ll be my Edward and Bella.

The point is, fanfiction is not the end for me. It’s a beginning. I’ll be honest here: My goal is to write a novel, get it published, make One Billion Dollars, and retire to an island with Mazzy.

I won’t P2P. Without commenting on what other people have done, because I don’t know their situations, I’m just not comfortable with the ethics of it. But I do plan on using my next fic, or the one after that, as a first-draft of sorts for my first book. I imagine I’d have to radically rewrite the thing to make it good enough for publication because, let’s face it, the stuff I publish here isn’t as good as it could be.

Anyway, thank you all for welcoming me to the fanfic world. I’m not laughing anymore.