Snowflake Challenge Day 2

[tjs_whatnot]

In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story.

Ha ha! I was going to cheat and just copy/paste this post from 2020’s answer to this question, but: A) I don’t want to be only associated with Harry Potter anymore and B.) the reasons why deserve their own post.

So, I thought I’d talk about a different fandom, or lack of fandom? Conglomeration of fandoms? IDEK anymore.

After being a voracious reader for most of my life, I hit a dry spell in the 2010s and it continued until 2023. So, a good decade of sporadic writing, reading a few fanfics and then not even doing those things. Until on New Year’s Eve 2022, I put out a Facebook post asking for book recs. I wanted to start reading again but I didn’t know where to start.

I got a lot. I started at the top and read a book by Stephen King, Dave Grohl’s memoir, A book by Sarah J Maas, and then I read Red, White and Royal Blue.

It changed my life.

Bit dramatic, but it did. I read it (okay, I’ll be honest--listened to it) like I was reading really powerful fanfic. Like I was reading the kind of queer stories that I’d only read as fanfiction, that I only thought existed as fanfiction. I was enthralled.

I gushed about my discovery one day at my local writer’s group to a friend, and she said, “Well, if you liked that, you will LOVE Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall.” She was right. I also loved Husband Material and every other book of theirs I read that year. I spent the rest of the year DEVOURING queer romance, the steamier the better.

It was a great year.

Then (again on FB) I was perusing a post where someone was complaining that these new Hall books weren’t as good as their older stuff. I thought that was crazy (even though I can sort of see their point now that I've read The Spire series, but still) , but then they also went on to say the same thing about T.J. Klune, and I said, “Who is T.J. Klune?”

Again with the over dramatics, but OH MY GODDD! This discovery of this writer truly changed my life. I started with How to Be a Normal Person and I'm the Lives of Puppets and since those two books were on two different spectrums of Klune's career, I saw what the guy meant and I sort of agree that his big, now mainstream(ish) things aren't nearly as good as his older things, but they're all still pretty fabulous.

And he's so proudly, loudly and fantastically queer, and I love him so very much.

Reading his books, and other queer books by queer authors helped me understand just what had been missing from the things I was reading and maybe why I stopped reading and instead turned to fanfiction.

When I read and wrote fic, it was slash, it was femslash and it was gen with a othered in someway viewpoint. Most books I was reading before 2023 didn't have any of that.

I remember saying, when I signed up for Yuletide in 2023 and all the fandoms I requested and offered to write had canonically queer characters and relationships, “Oh wow, is this how cishet people always feel about their OTPs?!?” I had been so used to having to put on slash goggles or dig deep in secondary characters to investigate the relationships and the dynamics I was most interested in.

So, that's the origin of how I discovered queer lit and also, in so doing, discovered more about myself. ❤️❤️

I'm still mostly in the consuming phase of my obsession, but I'm also more than interested discussing, reccing, being recced and gushing over queer books if anyone wants. I have created a few things, but not too many, though I'd love to write more. Someday...