lexluvsclark had an interesting post about badfic and every author's humble beginnings. Which is well timed, because just a little while ago I got some feedback on a very old story of mine which shall remain nameless. That was cool and unexpected, so I thought I'd go reread the story. Now. I don't want to say it's bad, because that's insulting to the people who feedbacked me... (fed me back?) ...liked it. Also, it's not "bad" in some simple way. It's just got a number of problems that I wasn' able to see back then, that only time and writerly progress illuminated. The good points struck my eye, too. Some of the medical jargon is pretty damn sophisticated, for one thing. I worked the Net hard in those days to make my Scully-babble sound plausible. But I see a lot of awkward stuff now that I didn't see back then--redundancy up the wazoo, and several dense purple thickets in the landscape of my prose. Also, I'm not too sure how I feel about the Mulder. I don't recognize him. That may be in part because I've let our old acquaintance drop. (My sneering brain: "Oh, you'd like to think that, wouldn't you?") I no longer know how he talks or thinks or behaves. The Scully still strikes me as pretty good.
Anyway.
linabean has a persuasive post riffing off that one, an apologia of sorts, lending eloquent voice to the fan-fiction hobbyist--you know, the writer who says "some of us are just here to have fun" whenever Bitter Old Fic Queens complain about comma splices. Very thought-provoking.