Bitter Maggots at Midnight
I’m still midnight blogging. Pay no attention to blogger - I’m on my free hour of daylight-unsavings time. I was finally admitted to the playground at EnterpriseAndBeyond. I’m still afraid of getting involved in ENT, but I wanted to see the inspiration behind the bitter maggot blog. It took a bit of hunting in the archives–for some reason no one used the subject line bitter maggot–but I think I found the core of the issue.
No, I’m not going to rehash it. There are so many problems with fandom that the particulars don’t really matter anymore. Just as it doesn’t matter exactly why, when I take out DQ Babes in the Mirror-Mirror Universe and think of all the ways I could improve the story, I don’t fix it. Or rather, I don’t take it out in the first place.
If fanfic is a hobby, it should be more fun and less power-trips and clique-blowouts. If it’s a calling, then it should be more respectable, instead of a matter for jokes like that Back To The Future fanfic link someone posted to ASC. If it’s work, then I ought to own what I write, instead of living in Paramount’s legal penumbra. If fanfic writers are better than pay-per-fic hacks, why do people go on reading pay-per-fic instead?
I repeat, this is not a bitter maggot post. I’m just thinking aloud, trying to understand why I hardly write fanfic anymore, and trying to have something to say to Michael when I tell him I can’t write for his project. The reason, I think, is that it is his. I cannot share B’Elanna the Muse, not with him, not with jetcers, not with virtual seasons–not even with the Great Bird of the Galaxy, sometimes.
B’Elanna has always gotten me into trouble, for not writing kissyface, for writing canon instead of J/C, for writing Trek instead of the X-Files. I have to conclude that the people who complain about B’Elanna don’t have the muse. Anyone who asks why you can’t just fix it or toss something out of character into your story because it fits their arc knows not the muse. It’s one thing to be a hack if it means putting food on the table, but to be a hack for no reason, just to satisfy a clique of virtual people, is a betrayal of the muse.
It’s never wise to betray a god, not even an illusory one.