The Guardian Profile Challenge -- Tell us how great you are

[rthstewart]

This article was just infuriating. If you’ve not followed the epic rants on Twitter, a white male pro author (who is apparently pretty good) and the Guardian suddenly discover Narnia fan fic and wildly praise his scintillating tale of the years before Jadis’ rule and the creation of the Stone Table. The article and a separate opinion piece bemoan that this brilliant story cannot be published nor the author compensated for his amazing work because there is that crotchety thing known as property rights in copyrighted material, in this case owned by the Lewis estate.  But, the praise continues, this fan fic is SO good, maybe it's time to re-examine copyright laws!

Oh such a tragedy. Men extolled for writing fan fic (so much so that his friends start lobbying for the law to be changed) and women mocked.

So, I posted an epic Twitter feed of Narnia recs (with self recs specifically encouraged). After bitching with cofax7 , petra , and WingedFlight others, and getting a few super nice comments, we decided we needed to write glowing puff pieces about ourselves and our uncompensated contributions to any fandom.

Winged calls it the #guardianprofilechallenge.  Please write your own few hundred words extolling your virtues as a fan fic or other creator in fandom.  Or, maybe you're just a really awesome fan!  Write that too!  Post it anywhere -- DW, Twitter, Tumblr, whatever.  Style it as a Guardian article, a press release, a blog post, or whatever you like.   After you are exhausted with praise for yourself, post the link here or reprint it in comments so that we might discover and praise you, too.  Because if white dude author guy can print 75 copies of his fanfic and has the gumption to approach the rights holder about publishing it (yes, really), and gets his friends and the Guardian to make that behavior seem reasonable and praiseworthy, well by Gaia, god, a pint of beer, and Aslan, we can do it too.

And I spent this afternoon high on pain killers after my root canal and writing this so you'd better contribute or I'm going to feel like an idiot.

Comments

[katharhino]

So the guy made a newbie mistake: he didn't lurk before posting. But instead of realizing his mistake, that he's not the first person ever to have thought of writing a missing-scene fic, he's got the Guardian begging us all to join in the woe (WOE) that this brilliance will be denied to the world. That is the most annoying part to me, the tone of utter tragedy that we cannot all read his fanfic.

As I've written most of my fic, and all my long-form fic, in Austen fandom, I could actually publish if I wanted to. I'm not going to deny that the thought has occurred as Austen fic has taken off as a cottage industry, and I've seen other fanfic authors either self-publish or traditional publish. And I could use the cash. But without judging other people's choices for themselves which may be equally valid, for me, it just seems like a denial of the reason I wrote the fic in the first place, which was purely for love. (And I have the most kudos of any fic on AO3 in the extremely tiny Mansfield Park fandom, so there.)