Compliments to the Writer (Part 2)

This is part 2 of a 2 part series about complimenting authors.  Part 1 was published last week.  It deals with sending compliments to lesser-known, struggling authors.

I wrote my first two novellas in the junior and senior years of high school.  They were stories about a music group that I liked.  In fact, just about every story of any significant length that I’ve written has been fanfiction of some sort.  The NaNoWriMo story I am planning for this year is historical fanfiction in an AU setting with original characters (okay, it’s original fiction with historical inspiration… maybe I can get over that mental block I have with original fiction if I think of it as fanfiction).  I’m starting to get decently okay at remixing ideas and coming up with new works, I guess.

Which leads me to today’s topic, which is that of fandoms.  I’ve come to the conclusion that there are a lot of struggling authors out there that would love to hear a compliment about their work every now and then, but I wonder about the bigger, more well-known authors.

The other day, I saw a tweet that says you can’t talk about an author’s works enough.  To a degree, I’m skeptical about that.  They had a good argument though.  I don’t actually watch television, but if I did, I’d see commercials about movies, but not about books.  I don’t drive on the freeways much because from where I live, I go nearly everywhere via surface streets, but if I did see billboards, there’s a better chance that they’d be for a movie than a book.

So as I thought about that yesterday, I decided to go ahead and tweet about the book I read yesterday that I think that everybody should get.  Even though I feel like maybe people are sick and tired of me talking about how much I love the same books over and over and over again, we hear about the same movies and television shows all of the time, and nobody  bats an eye over that.

People also don’t bat an eye over people that go crazy over rock bands and television shows.  Teenagers have posters of their favorite bands on their walls, scream and go crazy at rock concerts, and spend hundreds of dollars on shirts and memorabilia (I certainly did).  People have been going to Star Trek conventions for years, dressed up as their favorite characters.  How much time have people devoted to learning Klingon now?  I read about a year ago or so that some people were raising their child to speak Klingon as a native language.

I can get self-conscious when I talk about my favorite authors, or write reams of fanfiction.  Okay, so maybe it’s a little weird that I spent so much time playing Divergent Trilogy on Quiz Up that I’m the All-Time Worldwide second highest rated player in the world (#1 in America)… but weird can be good, right?  Okay, so maybe I dressed up like Tris when I went to go see Insurgent in the theaters… but people dressed up in Belle costumes when the live action feature of Beauty and the Beast came out, what’s wrong with that?  So what if I’m writing all of this fanfiction in these little fandoms… and I’m the only person that’s published there for a year.  Maybe that makes me different, but that’s okay, right?  This one fanfiction author has written over a million words in one fandom that I read.  What’s the difference in writing a million words of fanfiction in a more popular fandom and 100k words or so in a less popular fandom?

I don’t know if I’ll ever not be self-conscious about being uber-hyped up about books that I love, but people go crazy over the World Cup, or football, or rock bands… so maybe it shouldn’t be that weird to be appreciative of the books that bring a smile to my life… and want to share that happiness with others by telling them about it.

I hope that doesn’t make me creepy…