I've been thinking about the differences between creating fanwork and doing fan work.

After Clare, one of my favorite writers and critics, wrote "A History of Western Media Fandom," I read a comment somewhere about the article that pointed out that the article would have been extremely hard to write without Fanlore, a fan wiki. Fanlore is referenced throughout Clare's piece, where she traces sections of Western fandom through the decades. It's true, too; Fanlore, a wiki for fan history that is maintained by the Organization for Transformative Works, is an integral part of her essay, and a gold mine of riches in fandom history. Even after finishing her article I found myself browsing through related Fanlore articles for hours. It's a great resource, and one I hope to contribute to one day even though right now wiki editing is a new frontier for me. However, seeing that comment made me think about the institution of fandom. It make me look at fannish infrastructure more closely, such as making fanwork like fic, vids, or meta versus running an exchange or planning a convention and how they're similar in intention but oftentimes different in output.

As a young fan, I was largely a lurker in most of my fandoms for a combination of reasons, most of which were related to how small they tended to be. Having a voice meant that everyone was listening, which was scary to me as a baby fan. I read a lot of work and followed discussions on forums and later mailing lists, but I didn't engage all that often until the Final Fantasy fandom. It was there that I found more acquaintances, and, after a short time, became the moderator of an already existing mailing list. I discovered quickly that I really, really enjoyed the maintenance of my tiny fannish community. I went on and did quite a bit of this as a young adult: running fannish mailing lists, organizing fanfic challenges, and running fanlistings. I even went back to fandom I had only lurked in and got involved again, opening and managing an online Sailor Moon trading card collection game for a few months and dipping into fanfic while it was active. I co-moderated numerous fannish projects between the late 1990s and 2005, until I got more involved with fandom on Livejournal.

When Livejournal led me to newsletter communities, sets of curated news and fanwork from around fandom that populated the service, I was hooked. After discovering Quick Quote, a Harry Potter fandom newsletter, I opened Final Fantasy Press in 2005 and ran it until 2011 when the service used to curate it, Delicious, was rendered obsolete by new owners. I had side adventures in other newsletters for Kingdom Hearts, a PS2 game, and One Piece, a manga. In 2007 some friends and I opened our first fan work exchange for writers and artists, Final Fantasy Exchange, which is still active today.

My involvement with fan management on Livejournal definitely led me directly to the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW). The OTW was established in 2007 by fans on Livejournal. The OTW is a nonprofit fan organization that believes fanwork is transformative and fair use. I was always in support of its initial premise and its plans to build an archive and create a public face for media fans. In 2009, I inadvertently volunteered while providing some feedback about the beta version of Archive of Our Own (AO3). They asked me to serve, and I said yes.

It led me through AO3's Tag Wrangling team to a leadership position, and then deeper into the organization with Volunteers & Recruiting, the HR team. Although I left Tag Wrangling in 2012, I have been with Volunteers & Recruiting since January 2010. It's been hard work—that I and other volunteers do for free—and a type of work that's as intense as any job in professional people management would be in paid circumstances. But I love it; the puzzle of best practices and how to apply them, writing documentation for the widest possible understanding, meeting fascinating people who are passionate about the OTW and its projects, and the warm buzz of completing a difficult or complicated task. But this work I'm doing is only tangentially related to the creative output of fandom: the committee I am on is serving committees that are making it possible for fans to store their fan work and build their communities. It's related, but it's quite different.

And of course I love fic, art, vids, podcasts, cosplay, meta, and the newest edition, Tumblr gif sets and remixes. I still write fan fiction of my own. It's lovely to make things and share them with other fans, but after a few decades in fandom I've realized I am probably one of those fans who is more comfortable on the work side of fan work, doing creative, but nonfiction, structural work like working on fan archives, organizing fan work challenges, running a newsletter or an exchange, and maybe even, one day, getting involved in running a convention like WisCon, VividCon, SinpOZium, or Escapade. There's a lot of work like this that I'll probably never do: editing anthologies about fandom; publishing an academic journal like Transformative Works and Cultures; doing legal advocacy like the OTW Legal Committee with two DMCA exemptions under their belts; or focusing on digital or physical preservation of fan work like fanzines and comics like Open Doors or the Fan Culture Preservation Project. It's all tied in to build structures that preserve and provide ways and means for fans to keep producing and sharing more widely with the intent to keep our work accessible for all fans.

I'm more drawn to engaging in fandom this way, and I'm certainly glad the culture of building, maintaining, and preserving is here for me to participate in. Running that first mailing list was a gateway for me. It made me realize how important fostering a community is, and it helped me very early on realize that to really persist, it's better to be as inclusive as possible. And I know my preference for work is also about the historian in me that wants the culture we're building now to be available for fans looking for their past in the future. Of course, this kind of thing comes with trade-offs: to persist, you have to change with technology and adapt quickly, which is often hard to do. I've watched a macro-fandom do that with the switch from mailing lists to Livejournal, from personal websites to interconnected social network identities, and although I didn't see it happen, I'm sure the transition from fanzines to blogs that's still happening is just as complicated, exciting, and depressing as I'm finding the transition from Livejournal to Tumblr. But even with all the technological changes, it's an exciting time. More tools mean more ability to build infrastructure that will last for the fans who want to use it. Larger fandoms mean more engagement with other fans, and more voices, perhaps from previously marginalized groups, get heard. We live in rapidly changing, technology enhanced, inclusive times.

There are so many ways to participate in fandom; we're all building fannish culture and contributing to them in whatever way we choose, from podfic to icon communities, from filk to fannish quilt projects, from anon memes to Tumblr reblogs. We're all in the business of fannish construction; fans create and build to accommodate their creations so more fans create, so other fans keep building. I've historically been a builder, although I love the fiction I've written. And since I threw in with the Organization for Transformative Works, I've embraced that creating support structure appeals to me more than ever. I remember the fandom organization I found as a kid and even if it changes drastically, I want fandom to continue for new fans as long as it’s feasible. I want to keep contributing and making something someone else in the future might pick up and adapt for fans after me, whether it's a fan work exchange or a volunteer policy document.

Where do you fall on the board of fannish creation?