Naomic Novik on fanfiction: "The magic of fanfiction is that you don't have to please anybody but yourself. It makes you value your own desires, and to figure out what you want, what you are not getting."

"The culture of beta reading in fandom is such that the people that are reading your work is the people that want to read it."

"The flip side is that we all get very passionate about the interpretations of characters in fandom, and it teaches you to become very passionate about those characters."

Fanfic culture according to Novik, particularly when you start writing in a new fandom:

"Fandom teaches you that you don't have to do something blindingly original to be worthwhile."

"If you are beginning writer, the number one thing that I would tell you is, 'Finish your stories before you post them.' AO3 is littered with the corpses of sad stories abandoned 3/4 through."

"The whole point is that you should be doing it because you are excited about it. If you turn it into work, you are in a way burning yourself. That's why I feel that way about not publishing unfinished things."

"If you are just doing the story, and you don't let yourself post until it's done, that creates an enormous power behind you. Because, I think, most of us crave that posting fun. That's why you post your story. You share it because you want to participate, jump in, connect."

"If you stop yourself from posting until you are actually finished, you are putting that energy behind the engine of your story, and that can sustain you until you post the finished product. "

"I wrote nothing longer than 5000 words for years. The moment that I started writing longer, was when I started writing original fiction."

On AO3:
"When I came back into fandom, we were all in mailing lists for a while. Then LiveJournal took off around the same time that Fanfiction dot got started."

"What happened was, in many of these sites, where people would create, they started to purge material like slash. Often it would be a particular source.

"LiveJournal was created by college students during the early dot com heyday, and it was a passion project that they sold for profit. It became a for-profit site."
"The new company wanted money, they weren't interested in the community-building aspects."

"They wanted to show advertisements to people. Between advertisers and groups like Save the Children, which were an anti LGBQT+ group, there started to be random and routine purges."
"This happens on a regular basis on any kind of for-profit site."

"Another for-profit company came along, called FanLib, who said that they were going to be the biggest hosts of fanfic in the Internet."
"Fanfiction dot net was getting A LOT of traffic. The traffic sites members saw the numbers, and they saw it as a great opportunity."

"Fanfiction dot net infrastructure was aging at that point. It still doesn't look great. But their entire board was built by guys that had never been in fanfiction in their lives. Their terms of service required you to indemnify them if they got sued for copyright infringement."

"I'm sure that their lawyers just drafted it in a standard mentality -- but it contradicted their main page, where they had a big splashy sign promising to connect you to the original creator."

"A couple of friends and I had been talking for a while about creating a site that was committed to protecting fans rights, advocating for them, and providing a place to store fanfiction that was supposed to be archival, to protect it."

"I posted a rant saying "I don't have time to do this, but if anyone wants to come up and help..." --> cue a couple hundred volunteers.
"I felt like I made a mistake, a fatal error. "

"All this energy had been created and everybody agreed, but if nobody did anything, all this energy would trickle away."

"We recruited the rest of the founding board through an open call, and that was the founding board for the Organization for Transformative Works.
https://www.transformativeworks.org/?lang=es 

"We deliberately created it as a non-profit, so that no matter how successful it is, it cannot be sold off for profit-making to become pillage.
"This is what happens in many communities, where content-creators become a product to sell."

"This is why AO3 has a position from the beginning of maximalist content. We post anything, even if we don't like it, unless it's actually illegal."

"If Warner comes to us asking to take down a story, we look at whether it's transformative and non-commercial. "

Other A03 projects:
Fanlore, and an Academic Journal posted regularly which name I didn't catch.

"I have been writing fanfiction since 1994. The worst years that I had writing fanfic was the year that I worked on NeverWinter Nights -- 100 hours work-weeks.
When I came back I started writing longer pieces."

**The Academic Journal is called "Transformative Works and Cultures"

"They publish classic, academic, peer-reviewed papers by scholars in the fan studies field, but they also have the symposium, where they often host pieces that are not by trained academics, but by fan academics...

...that are interested in the history of fandom. It creates a nice spectrum, between posting a random piece of meta on tumblr that's almost ephemeral vs. something a little more reasoned and structured, vs. a full-on academic paper."

"TWC is completely open-access, meaning that there is no paywalls, it's posted online, and any research that's there is freely available to anyone. You don't have to be an academic at an institution or have a library card. It's searchable, you can find the pieces..."

"That's part of our core principles of shared views and sharing free information and content."

About elaborate AUs that become original works: "That's what happened with Temeraire. I had just seen the Master and Commander movie, and then I'd read all the books in 15 minutes, and then I started writing fanfic."

"And the fanfic pieces started getting longer and longer. I think that's because the year that I spent working on NWN, and having to approach the story process in a very structural, engineering way, taught me a lot about how to apply the engineering mindset to the creative work."

"I know that all the sudden, after coming back from that, suddenly I had different, more expansive ideas, I could see a little further ahead, I felt like I was looking mentally for arcs...

"And the other thing is that the Master and Commander Books take place in a fascinating time period."
(Regency, Napoleonic, Georgian).

"For me the difference between an AU and original ficiton is that in AUs, I was still writing Jack and Steve. What makes it fanfic is that the characters FEEL like themselves, even if I put them in space."

"And then, I started to play with the idea of one of them being a dragon... but then I didn't want the HMS Surprise. I wanted the dragon to be a person. When I recognized that I wanted to explore that universe, I opened a new doc and started writing an original story."

"Now, when I'm writing original work, I know that it's original work from the beginning.
"I'm sitting down to write the thing that I'm under contract for, that I have a deadline for... and then I start writing something completely different."

"Writing is different. It's revising, it's looking through the galleys, which I hate, because you can't change anything. It's finding the title, which requires strategy, it's marketing to get it out there to a large audience."

"Because of all that work, very often, thinks that I think about in my fanfic, some of those ideas show up in my original work in the next book that I sit down to write."

"I don't hesitate to take a good turn of phrase and use it again, if it's small enough and makes sense for your characters to use it again, and they're not too close to the other piece where you used it."

"If you deliberately tried to take a line and use it again wholesale, that could only work in certain specific contexts.

"I'm thinking, Buffy -- that kind of patter -- where they quote dialogue at one another like we might quote Monty Python at our friends, and the point of it would be that people would recognize it."

"But if you don't realize that you are doing it, if it's small enough, it doesn't matter. If you do it on purpose, your audience also knows."

"Pro-writing advice: If you want to write, just sit there and write. Same goes to fanfic, with the exception that in fanfic, if you are in a slump... ask people to prompt you!
Ask for a drabble prompt.

Write a handful of things, set yourself a timer, like a challenge, write little snippets. You are having the fun of participating in the community and giving someone something that they really want. That's enormously rewarding, even if it's not a fantastically wonderful story.

And it's over, InstaLive cut the stream.
That was fun, wasn't it? :-)