30 days of fanfic meme, day 18

Day 18: Where do you get the most inspiration for your fics (aka "bunnies") from?

Other fans.

Okay, back when I started, my ST:TNG stories were all (I think) inspired by the episodes and/or my own take on Data. But I only wrote a few of those. Oh, one of them was 'inspired' by seeing a completely unrelated post—something about electricity, maybe?— with a 'D/Q' in there, and I thought, yeah, I could do that…

Same is true of the one-offs, they're mostly things directly inspired by the source material and where my mind took me.

But popslash, ah, popslash. SO MANY STORIES inspired by other fans.

My very first, Merchandising, was inspired by the comments on one of the many parts of nopseud's Pornutopia (plus, I suppose, my strenuous desire to join the fun). The second was my reaction to the amount of lube sloshing around in fanfic. The third, I remember sky, for a challenge at sky_pie. There are more sky_pie stories in my collection.

There are also *loads* of fics—forty-eight, if I've counted aright—that came out of fic_requests. My main index is chronological, and the first on there is Justin Junior, which I remember writing at Nopseud's house because Ephemera talked of an odd request that she didn't think anyone was going to be able to write, and… well, anyway. *SO* many stories from that community—with Ephemera being a source of particularly fertile prompts.

Then, challenges. I love challenges. My first 'long' story (10,000+ words is long for me) was written for the Reunion Challenge. There were songfic challenges and Poptober and Ninjetti's Fairytale Challenge and Sparklyglee and my own Dragon Challenge and all sorts. All sorts. Thirty-two stories, not counting the Remix or SeSa entries. Remix brings another six, and of course, SeSa—I felt like a bona fide popslasher when I participated in my first DWNOGA in 2005, and I've written eight DWNOGA/MTYG stories now and am pleased with them all (plus three 'MTYG testing' stories).

And there have been other odd inspirations too. I read a comment on fanficrants along the lines of 'you cannot write a rape scene where the victim enjoys it and still have a credible story', at any rate, I thought, yes I can, so Shade. Meta and discussions about consent issues sparked off The White Room and The Tale of the Wealthy Young Man and the Slave Who Gained His Freedom.

There's Lampfic, which was inspired because other crazy people fans started it. There have been half a dozen stories specifically written for particular individuals, outside of challenges. A bunch more written for a 'Day' (mostly Trickyfish Day), and quite a lot of the ones I 'just wrote' were for one of those month-long let's-have-popslash-every-day challenges.

When I look at my Glambert stories I think all but two comes from a source like this—a challenge or a prompt.

Basically, fandom is my inspiration.

You?