Now have ideas for another one...

Heh.

My fanfic motivation was pretty simple. Season 5's end. The incredibly sappy part of me was sad at the thought of Spike and Dawn frozen in time like they were at the end of The Gift. I had to move them on. By the time season 6 started, I was pretty finished with writing, but I did extend the series a bit.

Also -- introspective of a sort. Most of it was Mary Sue. I wanted to think about inserting myself into a different place, in a different form, and to see if it would be true. At least my part was, because my father read one of them and knew it was me without my name being mentioned.

And then there are drabbles -- perfect emotion/character notes. I haven't written any that aren't filling in spots, or canon-compliant speculation. Or just arsing around. Those are a delightful challenge.

I might still finish my Giles-faces-a-succubus-while trying to free his father story after all...the second part got kind of slow so I threw it out.But I think I could do it better now. And I wrote that because Giles' explanation for leaving in season 6 never felt sufficient.Writing Giles was a big challenge and forced me to dust off vocabulary I never knew I had. As well as being a radically different voice than mine.

Not much of a fan ficcer, but sometimes the re-dos are wonderful. I recommend CICATRIX (sp?) to anyone interested in a really dark re-thinking of the post-season 1 Buffy-verse.

Sadly, I don't have a link, but I suspect it should be easy enough to find.

Great to hear all your interesting views on the fanfic thing. I see now that the whole phenomenon is a lot more complex than I originally thought.

I guess I brought it up because the whole nature of intense fandom is a new thing for me -- didn't think it would happen at my age. I aint exactly a teenager anymore. (Though I guess it's no weirder than being obsessed with teams of overpaid spoilt sports mercenaries who just happen to play soccer really well.) There's no-one I know who I can talk to about this sort of thing -- my friend who introduced me to BtVS has now totally gone off it and when I mentioned fanfiction to her, she thought it sounded really icky. Must be my dour Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, but there's part of me that has trouble accepting that I have an obsession with a TV show and that I'm exploring that obsession by reading things that other similarly interested fans have done to tease out the edges of it. But I guess that's why I've ended up here -- at the Buffista Home for Weirdos. Where maybe I belong.

t bangs cup on table "One of us! One of us! Gabba gabba hey!"

Must be my dour Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, but there's part of me that has trouble accepting that I have an obsession with a TV show

No, I have one of those and one of those but not one of those.

Translation: dour Scottish Presbyterian upbringing; obsession with a tv show; no trouble accepting said obsession with said show

Indication that I am a Buffyholic and not an X-Philer

"My Krycek has two arms! So there, Chris Carter."

My immediate thought was: "Four, or only three?"

the whole nature of intense fandom is a new thing for me -- didn't think it would happen at my age

I feel exactly the same way...although if any of my friends dares to give me lip about Buffy, I can always point to the far crappier things that they invariably like.

but there's part of me that has trouble accepting that I have an obsession with a TV show and that I'm exploring that obsession by reading things that other similarly interested fans have done to tease out the edges of it

Oh, I think a lot of people go through the 'but, isn't it kinda, y'know, strange?' and the 'Oh, God. I'm just like a Trekkie. I should be greeting people with the Vulcan hand-thing and learning Klingon' phases. Or that might just have been me--but either way, there's definitely a cultural predjudice about being fannish about something which doesn't involve the movement of a roundish object about a big field, and it can be intimidating. For my first year of Buffy obsession I had very clear rules about what I wouldn't do and reading fanfic was most definitely on the forbidden list, because I could recite quotes from almost every episode (even though I hadn't seen three-quarters of them) off the top of my head, but reading fanfic?--well, that would make me weird. I don't really remember what made me give up on that idiotic notion, but I suspect it was the combination of some very good authors writing some very beautiful porn.

First they came for the ficcers, and I did not speak up because I was not a ficcer...