Slash Month Begins!

This whole month at Chicks & Dicks, we're going to be posting about slash, or M/M fanfictions.

For many of us, our journey into reading and writing hot stories between two (or more) guys starts when we read and write fanfiction in various fandoms. Some of us jump straight into the world of M/M romance, but we’re curious about fanfiction, slash in particular.

I remember when the first Lord of the Rings movie was released, I started to notice how hot the male elves were. Since none of them were apparently featured in any love story in the movies or in the book, I started to search for something else to appease my thirst for hot male elf action, and that was how I discovered fanfiction. Not satisfied with just reading, I started to write my first fanfic—that was how I popped my writing cherry. :D

I started by writing het romance (het meaning heterosexual romance, traditional romance between a male and female). It wasn’t long before I saw the light and realized that Legolas and Aragorn were much hotter together than Aragorn and Arwen. ;)

Many people scoff at fanfic, seeing it as nothing more than bad fantasy written by hormonal girls, with misspellings and grammatical mistakes. Indeed, a lot of stories in Fanfiction.Net—where anyone can post any story without concern—might fit the criteria. But we also have gems, some fanfics that are as well written or even better than published stories.

Not every fanfic writer is a hormonal girl, or even female, though females still dominate the fanfiction world. Some of these fanfic writers are professional writers and editors who have published original work. Some fanfic authors have also tried their hand in writing original stories. Success in writing fanfic might be the trigger they need to venture into publishing original work.

Some fanfictions have been published as original stories with varying degrees of success. Some of the most popular stories in this genre are in fact started as fanfictions.

My favorite author, one of the most respected in this genre, Josh Lanyon, said:

“I don't think there's any shame in starting life as a work of fan fiction provided the end result is far enough removed from canon.

In fact, it's worrying to me that some writers are so ashamed of their fandom antecedents that they want to pretend they don't exist.

M/M fiction is rooted in slash and fandom. There is no way around that. Gay romance is rooted in the gay pulps. The two are now inextricably entwined, but they did not spring from the same source. There is no reason they should have or that one is "better" than the other.”

During Slash Month on Chicks & Dicks, we are going to introduce to readers to several fandoms along with some recommendations for first time readers. We will discuss what draws writers to a particular fandom, what makes them write slash in the first place, and what makes them decide to write original M/M romance.

We also have a very special guest blogger, Julianne Bentley from Dreamspinner Press, who will talk about the difference between writing fanfic and original fic and some things to think about if you want to turn your fanfic into an original fic.

Slash Month should be interesting, we hope you enjoy it with us!

Cleon Lee

PS

Perhaps some of you aren’t familiar with some terms that are widely used when we talk about fanfiction and fandoms. Fanfiction is a story written by a fan that is based on existing stories from books, TV series, movies, mangas, comics, games, or even real life people and historical events. Fandom is a term that describes a particular book or TV series from which the fanfiction is based. Star Trek, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings are some of the most popular fandoms.

Slash is a term that describes fanfictions where the character is engaged in homosexual relationship with another character (from male-slash-male). Harry/Draco, for example, is one of the post popular pairings in Harry Potter fandom, while Grissom/Nick is quite popular in CSI fandom. The term canon refers to the facts and storyline that exist in the original work.