FanWorks 2019 Events

What's your greatest fear as a fan artist? Whether you're worried about negative (or zero) feedback, lack of experience in a new medium, or anything else, sharing your work online can be scary. Let's talk about some of our anxieties and how we can push past them.

Many fans make more than one kind of fanwork. Each kind of fanwork can have its own approach and can come with very different time commitments and methods of fueling creative drive, separate fannish communities, and unique complications and successes. In this panel, we’ll talk about how best to get into something new without giving up the creative outlets we already love, the challenges of balancing our time between multiple kinds of fannish creative drives, and how different our personal measures of success can be for different kinds of fanworks.

Fandom activity across several chatroom platforms has increased significantly. Is this the next big platform migration or part of a larger trend? What impact do invitation-based chatroom platforms have on community access and fandom as a whole? How do these spaces function, and what are the pros and cons to chat-based fandom communities?

Many things in fandom are worth preserving! But what about things that were never intended to last, from LJ entries so old we've forgotten they exist to our old fic we would really rather weren't on the internet anymore? How much control do we or should we have over our fannish footprint? How do we as fans and fanwork creators in the public sphere feel about fan studies preservation, documentation efforts like Fanlore, or private circulation of fic/art/vids no longer available online?

With shifts in fannish platforms come changes in the ways fans write meta and have discussions about source material. Tumblr reblogs can fragment conversations and make them difficult to track; Twitter has forced us to make brevity an art form. Few platforms make it easy to have fluid discussions about spoilers without spoiling our friends. How do we overcome platform challenges to keep fannish conversation going in 2019? How have social media and the pop culture spotlight on fandom changed the ways we write meta, and who we write it for?

Got an idea for an exchange or fest that you really want to make happen? Hear from experienced fandom mods on the best way to go about it, and pitfalls to avoid.

Did you know that Cervantes wrote the second part of Don Quixote (in part) because a literary enemy had already published a fan-written continuation? Or that Edward Bulwer-Lytton (yes, he of "it was a dark and stormy night") had a novel that was so popular that one sculptor sold 167 copies of a character's statue from it? Quite aside from pre-modern works that were almost entirely communally owned (such as The Matter of Britain, aka the Arthurian Legend), fans have been reacting to works that have inspired them. (Ref: The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825 by David A. Brewer). Let's discuss pre-20th century fan works.