This is probably one thing that doesn’t bother me about writing — there is at not point where I’ve been ashamed to admit what I write.
Okay, that’s actually a little bit of a lie, but I didn’t want to talk about fanfiction for, what, the sixth week in a row? I can’t help it; the bulk of my experience in writing fanfiction. It’s just what I did do.
I’ve never been, precisely, ashamed or worried about what I’ve written. I went through a phase in college where I deleted accounts that hosted the most pornographic of the stuff I’d written, worried that it would hurt my chances of becoming a “real” writer. (If only I could have known that 2012 would make a fad out of porn written by emotionally-immature women, I’d’ve kept it up!) And I sometimes sort of hedge around the topic of fandom, though less and less as I realize that I don’t want to fragment my experiences like that.
But when I was 17? Oh man, I was mortified of the very thought of people finding out what I was writing during classes. I used to hedge around it with phrases like “alternative fiction” and “character-building stuff.”
I think this might have even continued, if I hadn’t moved to Madison right out of high school to live/work with a good friend of mine. She’s a poet and very bohemian and all that stuff, so filters were things for other people. She knew I was shy and horrible around new people, and thus introduced me to her friends (and people we had just met) with, “Hi, this is Ashes — she writes gay anime porn!” And I mean ALL THE TIME. A friend of hers from her hometown (who is now published, so, hooray for him!) brought her his manuscript one afternoon, and she’s like, “Ashes wants to be a writer too — she’s writing anime porn right now!” And he’s like, “Cool, fan fiction is pretty rad.”
Or something like that. I was 18 and literally terrified.
But you know what? I realized quickly that no one gave a shit what I was writing. (And in the right hippie circles, it was actually interesting.)
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