OF identity vs your fanfic identity? What happens if you’re fortunate enough to be published?

[Darling_take_off_the_mask]

For those of you who hope to publish original fiction someday or have published it (talking about honest-to-goodness bound, in print, publishing) and are crafting an online presence for your OF self:

 

Are you building a wall between your OF identity and presence online and your FF identity? Should you have something published, do you care whether people know you also write/have written FF?

 

I’m giving some thought to starting up an online presence for my OF self. Won’t publish anything anytime soon, and obviously it’s a pie in the sky ambition, but it seems worth building up a presence as Melanie the serious!writer, maybe start following other authors, tweet about writing, start conversations, etc, so it’s there should I ever end up publishing anything. Even if it’s never a book and I just submit short stories to publications. 
 

What I’m wondering is whether I should connect it to my fanfic stuff (e.g. on my HPFT Twitter, link to my personal account if people want to follow me there; or generally be open about the fact that I’m the same person) or whether I should be caring about keeping the two separate.

 

Do you think it matters? What have you done or would you do? Do you see any downsides to people being aware that a published author is also/has also been a fanfic writer whose fics are all still up online?

 

Do I even make any sense? (Answer: Often not.)

[Guest Noelle Zingarella]

@RonsGirlFriday this is something I've been thinking about recently too. When I sent my essay to ScaryMommy.com, I kept it under my fanfic name; both because it was already in the archives here and on my tumblr under that name; and because I didn't really want any of my family members stumbling across it. I recently sent my poem Acedia to a Catholic literary journal, and I wound up keeping it under my fanfic pen name too; again because it is already here under that name, and because this journal has published some of my husband's stuff and I wanted to fail or succeed by my own merit. So it looks like what is happening, for me at least, is that I am just using Noelle Zingarella as my writing name, whether it is fanfiction or original fiction. I had thought of trying to have separate identities for fanfic and of, but the thought of keeping all of that straight online was daunting. I feel like it's a brave new world as far as publishing goes--traditional publishing is saturated as a market and is losing money and self-publishing no longer carries the amateurish stigma that it used to. I don't know if being honest about writing fanfic will come back to bite me someday; but I've learned so much writing it, and I'm proud of writing it, and so hiding it seems unnecessary. I guess that begs the question as to why I don't publish all of it under my real name; but when I started writing here, having the pen name to work under made me feel freer to explore things I probably wouldn't have if my real name had been attached to it. Some of my friends in RL know I write this, but I get to choose if I tell people or not. 

So what I'm saying is, my pen name has taken on a life of its own, and I'm just rolling with that, for now anyway.

[Jo Raskoph]

At the moment I'm nowhere near even writing anything that might be publishable, so the question doesn't pose itself for me really. But I wouldn't know what to do, really. On one hand I'm no good at keeping secrets and writing here is such a big part of how I started writing... So I'd have a hard time hiding all that. On the other hand it seems female authors who have admitted to writing fanfiction have attracted a lot of hate for it. I've followed some of the writers surrounding Cassie Claire on twitter and their past seemed to be a burden to most of them. I have no way of knowing if the haters would have found something else to hate on about them, had those writers kept their pasts hidden... But I'm guessing it has at least something to do with the amateurish image that sadly still comes with the word "fanfiction". Part of the accusation always seems to be that if a published story resembles a particular fanfiction, how original is that story and its characters if it was all supposedly inspired by another author's work at some point... I don't think I would want to deal with all of that if I ever were to publish something.

So, I don't know for me, but I guess it would have a lot to do with which genre I were publishing and how the general view on fanfiction had developed until then and in that particular genre...

[Darling_take_off_the_mask]

21 hours ago, Jo Raskoph said:

At the moment I'm nowhere near even writing anything that might be publishable, so the question doesn't pose itself for me really. But I wouldn't know what to do, really. On one hand I'm no good at keeping secrets and writing here is such a big part of how I started writing... So I'd have a hard time hiding all that. On the other hand it seems female authors who have admitted to writing fanfiction have attracted a lot of hate for it. I've followed some of the writers surrounding Cassie Claire on twitter and their past seemed to be a burden to most of them. I have no way of knowing if the haters would have found something else to hate on about them, had those writers kept their pasts hidden... But I'm guessing it has at least something to do with the amateurish image that sadly still comes with the word "fanfiction". Part of the accusation always seems to be that if a published story resembles a particular fanfiction, how original is that story and its characters if it was all supposedly inspired by another author's work at some point... I don't think I would want to deal with all of that if I ever were to publish something.

So, I don't know for me, but I guess it would have a lot to do with which genre I were publishing and how the general view on fanfiction had developed until then and in that particular genre...

I appreciate your thoughts, and a lot of what you said mirrors my own feelings as well. There is nothing wrong with fanfiction or inferior about authors who write it (or have written it in the past), but it does carry a stigma. But I also think you're right that haters will find something to hate.

[crowsb4bros]

I’ve been hemming and hawing on what I’m planning to do with my original fiction. I’ve been considering creating a professional-ish twitter account and creating an online presence. The real question for me is if I can contain my shit-posting enough to make it distinct from my fandom twitter account. I wouldn’t mind people knowing I’m a fanfic author too. Maybe I can pull some nerds to hpft!