3. Well, I'm writing a novel with someone I met online (aella_irene), and I swear that sometimes I spend more time interacting with her via the intarwebs than I do with the people I live with. We're on with each other on a daily basis -- not on chat, because I don't do that, but via e-mail and googledocs and occasionally LJ. I've gotten Christmas cards from fen I've never met in the flesh (and have to send a few back, uh, whoops), I've gotten packages from fen I've never met in the flesh, I've sent packages (both non-fannish); there are a number of people I interact with both on LJ/DW, via e-mail, and Twitter. Sometimes it is fandom-related. Sometimes it is not. A few people I know RL names; most people I do not. At some point in time, redangel618 and I will actually manage to meet up in RL, given the fact that we both live in the same city in the same general area. (We tried to meet up during Mardi Gras last year, but that kind of failed.) And, as we have established, I have kind of been making study-abroad choices on where the greatest number of fen are in any given area in order to have a ready-made community available. So. *shrug* I've been in fandom for eight years now, coming up on nine, and fandom's a living, breathing entity. It's a community that's as real to me as any one I've ever been in. It's not just something you can turn on or turn off; I think in fandom now, in ships and OTPs and YMMVs and fannish talk. I've probably learned more in fandom than I have in school. (And dude, if I could have just substituted eight years of fandom for my Intro to Gender and Sexuality Studies class, I'm pretty sure I could have still passed the final.)
4. The bigger the fandom, the more segmented it is. It's a lot easier to find your niche in a big fandom, and in a big fandom, you don't interact with people outside that niche. Small fandoms don't have that luxury as much. There's about the same percentage of crap in large and small fandoms, only in big fandoms, there's a lot more good stuff just by the laws of percentages. (Uh. Pretend that makes sense.) But -- big fandoms can be kind of lonely, sometimes. It's hard to get to know people. Of course, if you try and get to know people in small fandoms and you're writing stuff people hate, it's much less likely you'll find people who like it. So it's all relative. That boils down to -- considering I literally do not interact with my current fandom outside of my own journal and only occasionally in ficathons, I have no opinion on the subject at the moment.
5. Um. I don't...think so? Maybe for other people, but I don't think of fic that way. It's not about me (except of course it's about me, I'm the one writing it); it's about the story and the universe and what feels right. Thinking about fic as a representation of yourself seems...selfish, somehow, I guess.
ETA: On second thought, my concept of a fluid canon doesn't come so much from comics fandom, which I've never been active in (I read a lot in Smallville, some in Batman, but otherwise it's very little, and I've never written there), but from Star Wars fandom, which has layers of canon: movies take priority (but then there are the different versions of the movies, now), but then there are comics, books, deleted scenes, TV series, interviews, etc. I know that SW fandom has a very elaborate system of what takes priority in what order, mostly based on how involved George Lucas was. Fic writers could pick and choose from the different layers of canon (some of which, you know, contradicted each other, because the SW universe was, ah, very, very large). (I should probably able that I was involved on the very, very tail-end of the prequel trilogy fandom, about a year after RotS came out but before the Clone Wars series started airing. I'm old school, but not so old school as to be talking about the original trilogy.)
Also -- for me, writing fic is something of performance art. I don't generally write unless I think there's going to be an audience. Not always, but sometimes. (Possibly more often than not? I'm not entirely certain on this point, because...it's been a while.) Or at least when I'm initially getting into a fandom.
hi, this is bedlam and your daily dose of sounding completely crazy (part, uh, 2/2)
4. The bigger the fandom, the more segmented it is. It's a lot easier to find your niche in a big fandom, and in a big fandom, you don't interact with people outside that niche. Small fandoms don't have that luxury as much. There's about the same percentage of crap in large and small fandoms, only in big fandoms, there's a lot more good stuff just by the laws of percentages. (Uh. Pretend that makes sense.) But -- big fandoms can be kind of lonely, sometimes. It's hard to get to know people. Of course, if you try and get to know people in small fandoms and you're writing stuff people hate, it's much less likely you'll find people who like it. So it's all relative. That boils down to -- considering I literally do not interact with my current fandom outside of my own journal and only occasionally in ficathons, I have no opinion on the subject at the moment.
5. Um. I don't...think so? Maybe for other people, but I don't think of fic that way. It's not about me (except of course it's about me, I'm the one writing it); it's about the story and the universe and what feels right. Thinking about fic as a representation of yourself seems...selfish, somehow, I guess.
ETA: On second thought, my concept of a fluid canon doesn't come so much from comics fandom, which I've never been active in (I read a lot in Smallville, some in Batman, but otherwise it's very little, and I've never written there), but from Star Wars fandom, which has layers of canon: movies take priority (but then there are the different versions of the movies, now), but then there are comics, books, deleted scenes, TV series, interviews, etc. I know that SW fandom has a very elaborate system of what takes priority in what order, mostly based on how involved George Lucas was. Fic writers could pick and choose from the different layers of canon (some of which, you know, contradicted each other, because the SW universe was, ah, very, very large). (I should probably able that I was involved on the very, very tail-end of the prequel trilogy fandom, about a year after RotS came out but before the Clone Wars series started airing. I'm old school, but not so old school as to be talking about the original trilogy.)
Also -- for me, writing fic is something of performance art. I don't generally write unless I think there's going to be an audience. Not always, but sometimes. (Possibly more often than not? I'm not entirely certain on this point, because...it's been a while.) Or at least when I'm initially getting into a fandom.