Entertaining and somewhat illuminating. She basically categorizes fanfic as either “more of” – that written to provide more of the same as the original – or “more from” – that written to take the characters in other directions or put them in new contexts (most slash falls here). She identifies one source of the urge to write slash as the wish to explore the vulnerabilities of male characters. She explores the continuum of fanfic to profic. I found interesting and plausible her discussion of the way the fanfic community supports a writer (especially a woman writer)—giving tons of feedback, encouragement, shared interest, etc.—much more than the profic community with its inherent competition between writers does. ( )

A very well written book about fan fiction. My only complaint is I really wish she had written about my favourite fandoms and some of my favourite writers and referenced my favourite stories but I was familiar enough with the fandoms she did focus on and the book was highly informative.
nother problem with writing about fandom is most of the urls directing you to where her source material was..are no longer available. Geocities and Tripod vanished within a year of each other taking archives large and small and thousands upon thousands of stories and resources with them. If a site wasn't mirrored or the contents saved on a home computer somewhere...all that history was lost. Her biggest archive Fanfiction.net was never an impressive example of what constitutes a good archive except in its longevity and storage capacity. It was always too limiting. The latest take down of a major player was the loss of Yahoo as a host of fan fiction sites and mailing lists. At the end of the book where are the listings of story archives are to be found..is like a graveyard of stories and I am reading this book only fifteen years after it was published. ( )