About six months ago, I gave in.
I'd been fighting it for months, trying hard not to be one of those people. I gave it my best effort, I really did.
But I was powerless to resist.
I started writing fanfiction.
It started small -- I'm a writer by nature (I bet you couldn't tell! #sarcasm), and I spent most of early 2015 world-building in preparation for a bigger project. When I started writing fiction for the first time soon after, I realized something: I needed practice.
I hadn't written fiction in probably 6 or 7 years, and while I had lots of nonfiction writing experience, the skills just aren't the same.
This was probably in July.
I started small: a short story, only about 2,000 words, that was a character study of my forever favorite DAI Commander. That turned out well, if a little serious, so I took on some humor via Alistair in DAO. And before long, I found that I was enjoying myself immensely in creating these new scenes, new moments, within my characters' lives.
I spent the first 10K words or so laboring under the illusion that I was just practicing styles for my bigger fiction writing projects, telling myself that as soon as I finished the next story, I was putting fanfiction away and moving on with my own work.
That didn't happen. Instead suddenly I found myself so immersed in Bioware's Dragon Age sandbox that I couldn't get back out -- and I didn't want to. I loved my Inquisitor, and I loved the story I was creating inside DAI: the relationships I was growing, the conflicts I'd created, and exploring the themes of the game and its story in such depth and detail.
So now, when I'm writing this, I'm finally accepting that I'm a fanfiction writer. It took a long time, and many thousands of words before I was willing to add that to my list of accomplishments on this particular blog -- about two weeks ago, I officially broke 100K words, and this is the first mention I've made of my fanfic hobby to anyone other than my husband.
But I'm ready.
(That's not totally true; I'm still a little hesitant. But honestly, that's not because I'm ashamed of my work, but because my mom reads this blog sometimes and frankly, several of my stories are quite Not Safe for Work. At all. Like, explicitly NSFW. Adult content ahead. You've been warned.
Mom, if you're reading this, please skip all the ones rated "E" :-/
Anyway.)
Below, you'll find a link to my work, all of which is posted through Archive of Our Own. I know there are other, bigger, fanfic sites out there, but AO3 is my favorite, and I'm proud to be part of their community.
Without further ado, and in the spirit of celebrating International Fanworks Day today, I give you: Once More to the Breach, my Shakespeare-allusion-titled series about Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Please enjoy, and thanks for reading!!
