In which I waffle...
I figured I might as well use this journal to publish any vaguely fandom related thoughts I might have, rather than just using it to track other people's work. If there actually is anyone reading this, please feel free to skip right past, it's really just a place for me to waffle a bit and record some of my thoughts.
Guess I'll start this off with my fan fiction history. I've been reading fan fiction for about a year now, after being rather scathingly against it for ages. It was only after I started getting hooked on manga that I really gave much thought to fan fiction - I've been an anime fan for many years but never got around to reading manga till about this time last year when I started reading D.Gray-Man. The few examples of fan fiction I had read had been pretty damn appalling specimens and I had written off the whole scene as the haunt of semi-literate hysterical teens. But then I had the good fortune to stumble upon a great story (in the Allen & Lavi LJ community) and it's amazing the difference that a talented writer with a grasp of plot, characterisation, good spelling and grammar can make to your opinion of a whole scene! Through this one good story I discovered fanfiction.net where I proceeded to spend the next few months absolutely devouring anything even half way decent in the DGM fandom. Of course after a while I got more discriminating, and I have ended up now with a select group of authors on alert in the DGM community, and a few long running stories on story alert too.
After overdosing rather heavily on DGM fic, I decided to try a few other fandoms just for some variation. I dabbled briefly in Death Note fic, but never got that involved in it. I just have one single author I follow in that fandom, who has done a very long running series of L & Light AU stories that I enjoy. I then decided to move on to Fullmetal Alchemist. I am a huge fan of the first series and have been for a few years, and was initially reluctant to 'taint' it in a way, but eventually I couldn't resist and started investigating. It's a huge fandom, much bigger than DGM and it was a little daunting initially as there seemed to be so much waffle and crap. It was worth persevering though and I eventually discovered some amazing authors. I've found the best way to find new authors is to see what other good authors read and fave and so on. For example, reading the wonderful Babylon by Beautiful Fiction on ff.net let me to her LJ and then to Rainjoyous, and through her I found Sky Dark etc. I now read a lot more on LJ than anywhere else.
And I guess that's where I am now, spending far too much of my evenings indulging in this fanfic habit!