Celebrating one year of fan/work!

I’m sorry for missing last week’s drop— I couldn’t finish the draft I had in time for releasing it this week, and this week forced me into a different direction for the newsletter. A bit of a personal tack, even though you must have some idea of my personal voice from some of the essays that you’ve seen here.

I try to keep this newsletter on topic as much as possible, but I was reminded recently that this newsletter is now officially a year old!

Its actual birthday (aka my first post) is on March 15th, so I am a little delayed in celebrating it, but I am happy that I’ve somehow managed to continue this newsletter and gotten over a hundred people subscribed to it.

I’m not gonna name favorites, but I do have some pieces I wanted to reshare (especially for the newer subscribers) and a couple of reasons why I love them.

Fanfic writing as a futures thinking tool. I think this is one of the things I’ve written over the past year that I’m proudest of. I got over my fear of publishing, and I was able to transform something that I wrote for a paper in school into something that hopefully more people can enjoy and appreciate. This piece feels foundational to me, like you should be able to expect something like this out of fan/work. Maybe not every week, but at least once a month. I’m working on transforming other parts of papers I’ve written into something that might be of interest to readers here.

No empty callbacks. This is another story I’m glad I wrote because it allowed me to combine my love for storytelling, my on-off fascination with pro wrestling, and my love for stories that are longer than 1,000 words. I was also glad to see a reader pop in my inbox telling me that they were not into wrestling but that they ended up reading through the piece anyway. That has to be one of the highest compliments someone can pay me. It was also gratifying to know that people are willing to join me in the rabbit hole and I hope that we get to explore more stuff together this year.

When fandom blossoms into something new. I always love being able to bring my interests into fan/work and I knew I had to write BINI-related stories because I’ve just fallen in love with the group and I do enjoy being in the fandom. This is one of the first interviews I’ve done for fan/work and I was so glad to have been able to put this story together and do it justice.

Must we consume everything? This started out as a reflection that eventually became a piece on mindfulness, consumption, and use of technology in fandom. This is one I wish was longer, and I’m definitely going to revisit the subject in the future.

I’ve been trying to figure out whether a weekly drop works or if an every two weeks schedule might work better in terms of content quality. I try to do a mix of interviews alongside personal essays and more forward-thinking stuff, but doing this solo while balancing my full-time work and school has been rough, so I haven’t gotten to the level of consistency that I want to get to.

So do let me know: Are you team weekly drop? Or team twice a month?

Also, I’d love to know what you like about this newsletter and what you want to see more of. Sometimes working on this project feels like shouting into the void, so I would appreciate a bit of feedback. 😁

See you next week, we’re back to our Friday drops for this newsletter! 😁