I didn't promise to do these in any order! So let's begin with marginaliana, who asked: "I'd love to hear about your long term writing goals. Where do you see your writing life ten years from now, if you think that far ahead?"

Ten years ahead!

Here's the scary part - ten years ago, I was at about the beginning of my writing life. I was seventeen, and I'd been writing since I was twelve, so perhaps not the very beginning, but I wrote a story around that time - Walking Barefoot to Palestine - which apart from making me some friends who have stayed with me for years (hi, Sal!), has the dubious honour of being one of the first stories I ever wrote that I can still bear to look at. I've always thought that year marked a turning point: the year my writing became less about ALL MY FEELINGS and more about a craft I worked at, though one with enough feelings to keep me going for another decade and half-million words. I have no formal training as a writer beyond, er, A-level English and Legal Draftswomanship 101, but that ten years has been an education: I've written and edited and been edited and practised and played and tried things and written a few things I'm proud of and a few that were terrible but enormous fun and generally had the time of my life.

I've also written a novel and published some short stories, but - I did both of those this year. At the beginning of 2014, I resolved to get some original publication credits, and I did that, and finally finished the novel last month to boot, though it's out being looked at right now - so here's what I hope for ten years' time. To be able to look back at me-at-twenty-seven as I do now at me-at-seventeen, and say: that was a great time in my life, a time of transformation. Not quite so much transformation, perhaps - I think there's probably more change in a life, writing or otherwise, between seventeen and twenty-seven than there is at other times - but certainly change, and trying and learning new things. And one thing I have very recently started doing is thinking of myself as a writer. Not just a fanfic writer or just as someone who has a hobby to fit around my day job or just, anything - but a writer, someone who writes, a lot, every day. I look forward to meeting the version of myself who's been sustained by that thought for such a length of time.

We shall see.

I can't write, I'm too hot and have a banging headache, so let me write about writing.

First of all, I just finished Red Seas Under Red Skies, and I loved it. It's Scott Lynch's second novel, the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I liked and didn't love. With Red Skies, though, andrew notes that it's as though he wrote 350 pages and then someone said, dude, where are the women? So he thought about that, and after not passing the Bechdel test at all the novel then passes it continuously for another hundred pages. It's very cheering. And there is so much else to like about it - wacky adventures, pirates, ridiculously complex plots, really fucking awesome dialogue. And then, there is a scene in this book, right. ( spoilers - and why the women are so great ) Where is the fic. Seriously. A03 has a little, but where is the fic, someone write me fic, I am DEMANDING. Bah. Yuletide soon.

And now for the other thing, which I have been pondering. (I miss, sometimes, having people around who write. I know a lot of you do, and it is very nice to have you on the internet - but it has been a long time since I had meatspace people close by who write, and write in the same sort of way I do, idly, without a great deal of ambition-to-go-pro but a regard for the craft, nonetheless.)

Anyway. A little while back gavagai asked me for a bit of fic: Komal/Preeti, from Chak De! India, or something about Garak and Mila from Deep Space Nine. Chak De! India - I've written about it at greater length here, but in short: it's a marvellous film about the Indian women's hockey team, and their rise to meteoric stardom. I have much love for it.

Anyway, I found both ideas equally possible, so while I've never written for the fandom, I opened up a blank document to have a bash at it.

...and then stopped and thought, huh. The problem - CDI is in Hindi. And for me, fanfiction is about voices - it's about hearing those characters' voices in your head. Sometimes it's about other things, sometimes it's about a plot or a mood or a particular thematic study, but when I sit down to write a fic for someone else at the tip of a hat, it's about seeing if I can evoke the source material for that person.

And, well. How to write it? I couldn't write a story about them with them speaking in English. They don't - they're Indian women, they're Hindi speakers. I couldn't write about them in Hindi I think. Perhaps I could, with a great deal of time and patience. (I wonder - is a feel for language language-locked, like software to an operating system? One day I plan to learn enough of my native tongue to find out.)

But even if I could have written about them in Hindi, that would be no use to gavagai. And while I could possibly have written them in English with only the dialogue in Hindi, footnoted, that strikes me as messy.

I do wonder, also, if the matter is complicated by the fact that I am, myself, a Hindi speaker. If I didn't speak a word of the language, would that help? Could I, say, write Amelie fic in English? (Let us please put aside my incredibly limited French.) Might it also help if the subtitles for CDI were not so incredibly, laughably, hilariously awful, and were written in such a way to convey a "feel" for each speaker? I don't know.

I really don't know, and I'm not writing this to lead up to any particular conclusion. I'm just wondering if you all have any thoughts on the matter. I mean, people writing fic in English for anime and manga fandoms have surely hit this problem before, and I'm sure people wrote fic for Chak De! India itself a couple of yuletides ago. I'm just wondering.