Whoo! The fanfiction discourse! Y'all wildin'.

My two cents. Fanfiction is incredible and it is horrible. It does not cause your skills to atrophy. Anything that gets you to write is a GOOD THING. As you write, you will improve. You'd improve faster with an editor, but...eh.

Fanfiction also allows you to broaden your horizons in a way you might not as an established author working within a very rigid industry that has strict (and unspoken) genre rules.

Now for the bad. Fanfiction is the ghetto. Fabulous things come from the ghetto. And those fabulous things are disparaged. And the people there are dismissed and discriminated against. And they ARE NOT PAID FOR THEIR WORK.

Speaking as a member of a marginalized group, it is infuriating to watch writers from the same group create wonderful new characters to embed within these established worlds and not get paid. Because it's fanfiction.

It is infuriating to watch said writers spend their time writing heartfelt works of a professional quality. Fleshing out characters created by white men to be "backdrop interest" and never receiving a royalty payment. Because it's fanfiction.

The bad thing about fanfiction isn't the quality. There are piss-poor "professional" books. The bad thing about fanfiction is that it became a place to corral female writers and writers from marginalized groups. To keep them from the money. To keep them from being competition.

And yet I still wrote it. (And no, you cannot read it.)

I wrote it because no one was publishing the stories about these black characters that I wanted to read and if I didn't write them my soul was going to die. I wrote it because I was a weird, overdramatic kid and needed an outlet for that.

What I would like to see is (1) more people of privilege embracing fanfiction instead of establishing groups to force their desires into canon and (2) more "call ups into the majors."

The second one is hard because professionals cannot look at this stuff. I completely stopped reading it long ago. Because it can lead to a world of trouble.

BUT if you are a fanfiction writer with a following and you'd like to move out of it, I'd suggest having samples that can be looked at. Something an editor can flip through when he hears your name circulating in fandom.

Social media is fanfiction for academia.

I gotta stop tweeting.