Hugo Fan Awards

[lydamorehouse]

Apparently, the latest SF/F community kerfluffle is around the fact that certain people would like to eliminate the fan writing categories for the Hugo Award. naomikritzer, who I swear knows everything about the Internet, told me about this when we hung out this afternoon, and read Elizabeth Bear's really eloquent and awesome post about it out loud to me while we ate cookies on the front porch: http://matociquala.livejournal.com/2195044.html

I'm fairly certain a person could take one look at my icon and understand where I fall on this issue. Hell, the fan category may be my ONLY HOPE for ever winning a Hugo at this point in my career. However, what I wanted to share here is about my experience with younger fans. As I noted on Bear's LJ, my fandom is young. Anime fandom just is. Most of them are at LEAST half my age. This rarely bothers me because my participation in my fandom is shielded by the Internet. I don't use my real name on AO3 and because I went to Tumblr to follow some of my AO3 friends, I use my fannish handle there too. So, no one knows I'm 46. Except when I tell them...

...or they ask.

A young lady found me on Tumblr and squeed in a private message that she'd wanted to comment on my epic ByaRen fic that I was her favorite fic author ever, but she didn't have an account on AO3. So, she was happy to see that I was on Tumblr and yay! I wrote yay! back and thanked her and we got to talking about fandoms and life and such. She asked me (this was back in June) if I was off school yet.

Hmmmm.

Conundrum.

I decided, like I do with a lot of decisions about coming out, to just go for it and tell her the truth-- that I've been out of school for SOME TIME. In fact, at 46, I was probably as old as her mother. I figured if I lost a follower because I'm too old for Tumblr, so be it.

I expected the conversation to die awkwardly and for her to quietly un-follow me.

Instead, she was... gratefully amazed to discover that she didn't have to give up fandom to grow up. That, as I told her, "Yes, my friend, you CAN grow up to be an otaku."

This is germane to the debate about the fan category because we need new blood, but they also need us I had mentors when I entered fandom. Older, grown-up, professionals who were living and leading by example... showing me that yes, some day, if I worked hard, I too could be on panels or maybe even finish a book and get it published. Because here were real people who wrote books on my book shelf. Just by existing, these mentors gave me hope. Made ME become the graying fandom that wonders where all the kids have gone....

So, yeah, we need them. But they need us too.

Comments

[mariadkins.livejournal.com]

gratefully amazed to discover that she didn't have to give up fandom to grow up.

And i find that beautiful. :)

[lydamorehouse]

I know, right? It was probably one of the sweetest conversations I've ever had. I mean, there's this myth that apparently still circulates that somehow old/older people are.... I'm not sure, boring? So consumed by making ends meet that they no longer have any joy left? I'm not sure, but she was seriously happy to hear that she could still watch Anime at 40 if she wanted. I was like, girl, I have MORE time to watch anime now that my life is settled. :-)

[mariadkins.livejournal.com]

When I was 18, my stepdad told me I'd "outgrow" rock'n roll before I turned 30. I laughed in his face. ;)

[empty-mirrors.livejournal.com]

So let me get this straight. In a community that is aging and struggling for new blood, some of the PtB want to remove award categories which reward that potential new blood, and throttle an innovation which opens the community to a whole new population of new blood. Hmm, well, it's good to see they thought that one through.

*headdesk*

One of the things I adore about fandom is that I can be as old or young as I want to be. *sticks out tongue and skips away*

[lydamorehouse]

Hee! It's true, and I like it for that and because I can hide my past sins as it were. I don't have to be 'famous' author. I can just be another otaku Bleach fan and we can all play together without anyone feeling like... I don't know, like they have to act like I'm somehow special-er because I got lucky enough to publish a book or two.

But, yeah, one thing that has long made me crazy is this desire to separate any of us from one another in my profession. SFWA goes through this a LOT. There's always some huge debate about what qualifies PRO status. Are YOU COOL ENOUGH for us? Are ya, punk? For reasons known only to the inner PtB, the answer is almost always no. And then they have the nerve to wonder why they have no budget to do the things they want. Meanwhile, the Romance Writers of America (RWA) lets anyone who wants to join and they have enough funds to actually spend serious money tracking exceedingly useful things like professional studies of the trends in romance readers' buying habits, etc.

Personally, I have no use for this. I think if someone is writing and finishing things they're a writer. I don't care if it's published on AO3 or by Penguin. Why not have awards for all of us. Particularly a Hugo, which is FAN AWARDED. Nebulas are awarded by SFWA, so you know, if they want to be snotty, it's their organization (technically also mine as I joined as a life-time member back in 2001.) But, the Hugo as always been fan nominated and fan awarded. So, what the heck.

Oops. This was rant. My bad. I guess I have fan FEELS.

The Young And Weird Need Mentors.

[idairsauthor.livejournal.com]

Seriously. It's hard being weird.

One of the things that really drew me to the Internets back when they were a new thing in the early 1990s was that they enabled intergenerational friendships. The Star Trek fans who became my core Internet friends ranged in age from about 18 to about 60, and I thought that was pretty cool. Because there is a lot that the young(er) and old(er) can learn from each other, and it is a shame that paranoia about sexual predation has made everyone paranoid about teenagers and adults interacting under any circumstances or for any reason--even just talking to each other about a show they both love.

I also am old on tumblr, and I have to say I find it strange. So many pictures, so few words; so very much SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. I will say it is nice to have easy access to images of stuff that I'm interested in but would never go looking for, and I've had some fun playing around with image-based posts, but I don't think that long term it will be for me. I try to do the "casual coming-out" about being, you know, 44, by mentioning that I have kids, posting stuff about parenting, etc; but the thing is that tumblr is so drive-by that most of the people who read your posts a) don't know who the hell you are and b) have no idea that you authored both post A and post Q. Ah well. But you are right to keep on mentoring. It is so important for people to be able to see someone doing what they want to be doing or being what they want to be 30 years down the road. It makes it possible for them to imagine a bright future--which is important, because most of the rest of the world is going to encourage them to imagine a dark one.