Fandom Snowflake - Day 5: Feedback

[tielan]

Leave feedback for a fanwork. Or multiple fanworks. It can be as simple as I liked this to a detailed list of all the things you loved about the fanwork. The key is to leave some sort of feedback.

If you've already left feedback in the course of a previous challenge, it totally counts. But you're free to leave more feedback.

I write for myself - I do. I've written, scribbled, notated, sketched, and plotted ever since I was old enough to imagine anything. But I post because I like sharing my view of the world with other people - stories touch hearts, touch minds, seed ideas, change the world: what if...?

Still, without feedback, how do I know that I'm doing it right? How does anyone know that they're not perpetrating bad ideas, racist attitudes, limiting perspectives? How does anyone know that they've inspired something bigger than themselves?

I sent my first feedback to a professional author who I didn't know personally a couple of years back - Loretta Chase - after reading her wonderful romance novel Silk Is For Seduction. I apologised for what I was about to say, and then I gushed about how much I'd loved her story and how I was going to go out and find more of her books. Which I did. And we now have a whole heap of her novels, and the last one in the quartet that started with Silk Is For Seduction has just come out: Dukes Prefer Blondes.

Before that, I'd given plenty of early-reader feedback to jo_graham, mescott, and amygriswald while they were writing the SGA Legacy series, which I highly recommend if you're into SGA and don't mind equal team. But Ms. Chase was lovely; she mailed me back to say thank you and how lovely it was to hear from a fan. And, no, I'm not a famous published author, but I know how nice it is to hear from someone who has the time, energy, and wherewithal to give feedback.

I don't think it's rude not to leave feedback, but I much prefer it when people do. And it connects fandom together. 90% of my fannish friends have started by me leaving feedback with them, or them leaving feedback with me. Sure, you can reblog their tumblr posts, but without adding your own personality to it, how are they going to get to know you?

Anyway, with this season's Yuletide, I recced stuff and left feedback. And I commented on some of the stories in the Pacific Rim and Captain Hill exchanges, but it was a crazy week, so I still have to go back through it all.

Today's feedback, though, was left on and the heart it will not be denied by idonae, which is an MCU: Maria Hill/Steve Rogers fic, with a femmedomme component. The D/s is very marginal, but the intensity of the story and Steve's perspective is breathtaking.