somebody please stop me.

[allchildren]

A few weeks ago a friend mentioned wanting to go back and rewrite a couple fics that she felt had really missed the mark. My first thought was the sad lesson of George Lucas -- surely he has taught us all the value of leaving it the fuck alone? But I was also intrigued in a way to do it better. We do DVD commentaries on our fics, right? We do fic-art big bangs where the one inspires the other. We allow others to remix our work. Why not remix our own work?

No. Why not remaster our own work?

Of course, remastering is old news to vidders, and I've seen iconmakers do it too, though not under that name. Why not fic too? Why not fanmixes? Hell, any fannish work. I think we've all done things that we later realized were flawed in ways we actually did know how to fix. With remastering, we're not pretending that the original piece never existed. We acknowledge that we tried and made something to the best of our ability. The old work will still exist as it was. We're simply applying the transformative principles of fandom to something we ourselves made.

Aw, hell. remaster_thyself. This is why I should never be left alone and unsupervised, for the record.


(Unrelated: I have three DW invites, if anyone needs one.)

Comments

[wordsatourbacks]

I've seen fanfic authors remix their own work before - not often, but the ones I read "remastered" well!

[allchildren]

Why not? :D!

[schiarire]

That's a clever idea :O cool!