During FGB: New Moon, teams allowed a group of readers who wanted a particular POV or outtake to pool their donations and ensure a winning bid—but in FGB: Eclipse, they took on a life of their own. Entire websites and Twitter handles were created and dedicated to keeping team members informed of current totals or relevant news. Listings offered by some of the most popular authors in the fandom at that time resulted in tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of donations raised by their teams alone. Not everyone was a fan of the team effort. Some of the larger teams were huge and consisted of hundreds of people, making it a daunting task for lesser-known authors to compete in terms of fund-raising; of course the largest amount raised would be by the most popular authors, since they had the largest teams. There were some ruffled feathers, yes, but the point of the auction was to raise as much money for ALSF as possible, and nobody could deny that the formation of teams did result in a far greater amount being raised.
With an initial goal of $50,000, FGB: Eclipse ran from June 26 to July 3, 2010. We worried at the outset that we’d overestimated, and were certain we’d never surpass the previous amount. But the Twilight fandom did it again, and we were floored when the final donation tally came in at $147,537. All in less than a week.
There were tears on Skype that night. All of us—the organizers and volunteers—were exhausted but ecstatic to have witnessed such an outpouring of love and generosity. The love and pride we felt as a fandom was palpable across the internet that day, but the sense of community fostered during FGB lasted for much, much longer.
FGB continues to run, though on a smaller scale, and embraces several fandoms outside of Twilight. To date it has raised over a quarter of a million dollars for ALSF and pediatric cancer research, along with other causes such as autism awareness and natural disaster relief.
Snowqueens Icedragon (E. L. James) and Sebastien Robichaud (Sylvain Reynard): A Fandom Exchange
SNOWQUEENS ICEDRAGON (E. L. James) and Sebastien Robichaud (Sylvain Reynard/SR) are the first fanfiction writers to receive seven-figure contracts from mainstream publishers—and the only ones I know of to have done so. Both posted fics online, and both first published minimally edited commercial versions of them with small presses (The Writer’s Coffee Shop and Omnific) that had grown out of Twilight fanfiction archives. As E. L. James notes in the acknowledgments of Fifty Shades of Grey, SR “went first,” pulling his fic, renaming it Gabriel’s Inferno, and publishing with Omnific, as a number of popular fanfic writers had already done. The popularity of their stories and the fact that the two are friends led them to be associated with each other, but their personae inside and outside of fandom are as different as their fic. Fifty Shades of Grey contains far fewer musings on medieval conceptions of love as derived from classical models. Gabriel’s Inferno includes fewer orgasms. While their publishing contracts are in no way representative of fanfic, the authors’ differing attitudes toward writing, sources, and community do reflect some basic divides in fanwriting today.
Although she has not hidden it, James has tended to downplay her role in fandom—a role that was initially revealed to the general public on The Today Show in March 2012, when viewers wrote in on the show’s website in to suggest “the book everyone was talking about” had been plagiarized from a well-known fanfiction. James clarified—the fanfiction was hers. As the Fifty Shades story grew, James increasingly acknowledged her debt to Stephenie Meyer, and eventually praised the interaction and response she got from the “smart, warm, witty” women she met in fandom.96 But overall, she does not dwell on the fanfiction community as a source of inspiration.
Her author website clarifies the trilogy’s source at the bottom of a FAQ:
Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed were never self-published as these novels. An earlier version of this story began as Twilight fanfiction which was posted on the internet. The trilogy was picked up by an Australian publisher, The Writer’s Coffee Shop, who released them as e-books and print-on-demand paperbacks.
None of the above is untrue, but it is misleading. While as a literary critic I continue to be surprised at how simply swapping out a few names can change a reading experience, a few cosmetic changes of this nature don’t really constitute a substantially different version. (When compared on the anti-plagiarism website Turnitin.com—useful for content comparison despite the fact James wrote both versions—Fifty Shades of Grey came in with a 89 percent similarity index to “Master of the Universe” [MOTU].) James’ author website advises beginning writers that they should write, and it speaks in broad terms about her writing process (she likes “geography,” by which she means the arrangement of objects in rooms), but nowhere on the site does she talk about the interactive, multiply sourced (or multiply “inspired”) process by which she wrote and posted “Master of the Universe.”
While extremely close-lipped about his identity, Reynard has been more forthcoming than James about his connection to the Twilight fandom, nodding to his fandom identity in his recognizably connected professional pen name and openly expressing his debt of gratitude in interviews. Both writers were vocal participants in fandom while they were posting their stories, engaging their readers, their suggestions, and even their vitriol (Robichaud once suggested he went so far as to write an angry fan into his novel as a kind of vengeance). Both benefited directly and tangibly from the feedback, encouragement, interaction, and publicity their readership offered—as they used to frequently acknowledge in shout-outs and notes in their posted chapters.
In one such instance of fandom engagement, Sebastien Robichaud and Snowqueens Icedragon interviewed each other for a popular fansite. My students and I read this interview when we were studying their stories and the Twilight fanfiction community overall, and I linked to it on our class blog. Some time after the publication of Gabriel’s Inferno, the interview was taken down, but like much of fandom history, it’s been privately archived. The following excerpts give a sense of these writers’ lives and personalities, friendship, and writing processes, and the way Twilight and its community helped inspire and promote their work.
In response to questions from Sebastien Robichaud (SR in the excerpts, as he’s still known), Snowqueens Icedragon (Icy, as she was often called) details her discovery of fanfiction via AngstGoddess’ story “Wide Awake”—the “gateway fic” for her as for so many other fanfic readers and writers. The path to fic Icy describes is typical enough of this fandom—“Wide Awake” was discussed in all kinds of non-fic contexts):
SR: How did you learn about Fan Fiction?
Icy: Christmas 2008 NEW (my hubs and beta) bought me the Twilight saga—I’d seen the film in November 08—and I sat down and read them in 5 days, non-stop, and fell in love with Edward Cullen & the boy [Robert Pattinson] . . . I used to stalk internet sites about the boy. It was on Rpattz Daily on Live Journal that I saw two people chatting about Wide Awake—I was on holiday in Spain at the time [ . . . ] I found Wide Awake and couldn’t stop reading it. I spent £60 on mobile phone bills downloading it. I read it on Live Journal – and after that discovered Twilighted and Fan Fiction.
As the conversation turns to James’ inspiration, she suggests the initial impetus for her story came more from Twilight fanfiction than Twilight itself.
What inspired you to pen MOTU?
I read some BDSM [Twilight fanfiction] stories and wanted to know why people got into it and actually see the paperwork. So I started researching. It was always my aim to publish a contract pertaining to a BDSM relationship—so I went from there. I didn’t set out to write a BDSM story . . . I know nothing about BDSM other than what I have learnt on FF and the research I’ve had to do for this story (some of which has been great fun, let me tell you . . . sorry TMI—but then I told you I suffered from that)—Fundamentally I set out to write a love story—because that’s what interests me with BDSM as a back-drop.
BDSM stories were popular in the fandom after Tara Sue Me’s “The Submissive” (now publishe
d by Penguin) and “Master of the Universe”/Fifty Shades obviously riffs on that story as well as on other popular Twifics. In 2010, I included MOTU on the fanfic syllabus as representative of several then-popular genres within Twilight fanfiction, among them BDSM. The other major genre it represented was the one that grew up in the wake of tby789’s “The Office”—CEOward stories, as I sometimes thought of them. Like BDSM, the corporate setting was a popular way of literalizing the power differential between canon’s immortal ageless vampire Edward and clumsy mortal teen Bella.
From inspiration and process, the interview moves on to a possible endgame: publication.
Do you have any plans to publish and if so, what?
I’d like to. MOTU is the 4th novel I’ve written in a year. After my Twilight and the boy [Robert Pattinson] obsession, I sat down and just wrote a novel—I’d always wanted to do it and the time was right. I was exceptionally miserable at work so I escaped into my first novel [. . . .] Looking back it was a fan fic—but I didn’t know fan fiction existed at the time. I plan to publish it on FF when I finish MOTU—I think—but it will needs to be re-written. It’s quite a hard thing to pull off . . . and interestingly it’s written from two POVs . . . so I am going to have to think about that. My second novel isn’t finished . . . that’s the one I have high hopes for and I would like to re-write. NEW has a literary agent, and the field that I work in puts me in touch with many agents—so . . . who knows?
James, clearly buoyed by her success in fic, has publishing on her horizon, but it’s also clear how porous and fluid her sense of fanfiction is. She wrote a novel unaware that it was fanfiction—and announces plans to publish it (she never did, or hasn’t yet). Perhaps she felt that with MOTU, she wrote a fanfiction unaware it was an original novel. She uses publish as the verb that applies to FanFiction.Net. The answer shows a blurring or confusion of categories that for many other fan writers are absolutely distinct. (The implied but nowhere explicit contracts of fanfiction were another facet that originally drew my attention to MOTU—in which, early on, a contract is produced, discussed, but ultimately not signed. It’s a point of tension in MOTU’s story—and in that of its author.)
SR asks about James’ nonfandom beta, or editor/pre-reader (ultimately revealed to be television writer Niall Leonard), and his take on fanfiction: “it’s an amazing resource and a wellspring of hidden creativity. He thinks it’s the way the Web should go. It’s the future of the internet where people come together to create and enjoy stories.” Icy explains how she spends her time—all of it, apparently—devoted to engaging fans and writing her story: “all I do these days is fritter (my new word for this ridiculous social networking tool that I have unfortunately become addicted to) and write MOTU and occasionally try and catch up with the daunting MOTU thread . . .” The thread in question was the comment thread on the Twilighted forum where her story was also posted.
The fic’s comment threads on Twilighted were enormous: readers spent hours discussing her story, their reactions to it, their hopes, speculations, and expectations of characters and plot. Often, Icy joined in—early on asking for a banner for her story, asking for technical advice, eventually asking for other kinds of input. She sometimes responded to reader concerns in the fic: “I actually put Edward’s comment in because a few people had been asking in reviews what did Edward see in her . . . and that’s some of the answer there . . . I think you’re take on it is very interesting . . . I shall go away and think about that.”97 She often repeated how much she enjoyed thinking about reader comments, how she loved seeing all the theories about her story.
The interview turned to the author of “The University of Edward Masen,” and Icy asked SR about his inspiration and process. He credits a fanwork with his initial inspiration, while making explicit his intention to rewrite Twilight:
How did you come up with your storyline?
It dropped almost fully formed into my head after I got over the disappointment of learning that my favourite FF “In the land of Milk and Honey” was unceremoniously (but perhaps justifiably?) pulled.
I love how you weave canon into your narrative. Is this deliberate or do you find your fans pointing out things that you never intended and their interpretation is that you are following canon? (Happens to me a lot – sometimes I am… and maybe sometimes I’m doing it on an unconscious level)
My story deliberately includes canon, especially for the characters. This is so because UOEM [“The University of Edward Masen”] is my intentional re-writing of the Twilight narrative for an adult audience in a human universe.
Some fanfic writers incorporate suggestions more than others. SR claims not to have changed the overall shape of his story, but to have considered reader suggestions for smaller details, again reflecting the community feedback—often understood to be given in exchange for free stories—from which fan writers benefit. And the more popular the story, the more feedback it gets.
Has the path you’ve chosen for your characters changed at all from the feedback and reviews you’ve been getting?
No. The major plot points are fixed. Minor things could be changed if someone gave me a good suggestion. So for example, Miss JAustenlover suggested I include Edward’s lecture. I balked at this initially, for I thought no one would care to read it. I have been surprised and pleased at how many people wrote to me to say how much they enjoyed it. Who knew?
This scene remains in the published version.
In the interview, SR admits that he also has publishing dreams, in response to a question about “using his own characters” next time and trying to get published: “Truthfully, [I] would love to have a literary agent and write fiction professionally and be published, while still enjoying my anonymity and living in my hobbit hole.” Unlike James on her website, in this interview SR does recommend writing fanfiction as a path for aspiring writers:
Just write. Write what you know or what you don’t, but write and then have a trusted friend read. Let them give you suggestions for improvement. Correct your work, and then put your work out there. FF is a great venue. I’ve never shared my fiction with anyone since the last writing contest I ended. So this venue is very encouraging and very easy to enter.
Even for these two highly successful fan writers, however, the fanfiction scene is not without its negatives and potential consequences. SR reveals in his interview with James that he protects his identity because like many fan writers, he fears for his job if his identity were to become known:
do you enjoy your work?
I enjoy my work very much, which is why I’m trying to protect it.
I have a sense that you keep your real life very much separate from your FF life—are you afraid your colleagues will find about your fan fiction fetish?
Yes.
What would they say?
“You’re fired.”
The interview turns to the negative side of reader feedback and interaction:
How do you handle negative reviews/blog postings ?
Not well. Anonymous nasty reviews I just delete and it gives me an extraordinary amount of pleasure to do so. I have to learn to avoid blog postings, but I am a masochist at heart so I do look. I was reading one recently and I was astounded at the kicking the fic got from people who have never read it . . . which is rude quite frankly. They seemed to be especially peeved at the review count—according to someone on that blog, ‘1000 is the new 100 everyone!’ What upset me more was that an author whom I really respected dissed it—though she’s never read it . . . I have to say she’s slipped hugely in my estimation since then.
She’s clearly upset, as the unnamed commentator was AngstGoddess—the author of the £60 download fic that was E. L. James’ initial inspiration to enter the fic community.
In the comments section of the page on which the interview was published, AngstGoddess responded:
AngstGoddess003 Feb 5, 2010 05:16 AM [ . . . ] SnowQueen . . . I know you are referring to EdwardVille [a Twilight fandom communit
y] and I feel your comment about dissing was somewhat directed at me, since I’d made a comment on how I hadn’t read, but I assure you, my comment was certainly no dis. I simply stated a non-preference for BDSM-related fic. Sorry if that offended you. I actually defended your story’s epic review count, so I was a little confused as to the animosity there . . . ? Edwardville is fairly tame and the members go to great lengths to express their criticisms with respect. And the mods go to great lengths to enforce that. It is a very lovely place, and both of your storis have plenty of fans there.
(AngstGoddess and Snowqueens Icedragon would have more adventures together—spoiler alert—the very public outing of which left the fandom in turmoil. We’ll get to this shortly.)
The point I want to make here is simple: fanfiction communities are writing communities, and interaction drives them as much as stories do. Whether the individual writer is more or less community oriented, whether he or she actively incorporates fan suggestion or not, reader response feeds and sustains—and sometimes angers—the writing community. Snowqueens Icedragon and Sebastien Robichaud were no different. Novelists writing in a vacuum, even in a vacuum that includes some trusted friends, cannot know their story has the power to cause rage or joy. The way review communities such as Goodreads function may have some parallels, but the situation is not the same. The stories Goodreads reviewers read are fixed. The reviews there are for other reviewers, and authors respond to them typically at their peril. They aren’t offered in a system of exchange; readers are consumers, not participants. It’s this system of free exchange that many in the fic community fear commercialization may end.
An Anatomy of a Flame War
Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World Page 26