Non-Rec: Go Rec Yourself

[isabellerecs]

Day 8 - Fandom Snowflake Challenge

In your own space, post self-recs for at least three fanworks that you created.

Well crud, I am feeling at a distinct disadvantage with today's challenge for I am neither a fan-writer nor fan-artist. Up until now I've only had one type of fan-offering to bring to the table (yesterday was my first foray into making icons and I enjoyed it so after snowflake I think I will be revisiting that) so for today's challenge all I can rec is what I've got.

Fanfiction Recommendations by Isabelle Disraeli - I built a recommendations website/blog on WordPress. I created all of the graphics that I use there, the fandom and pairing banners as well as special banners for holidays, femslash, and other special tags. It has been a labor of love, and I suppose it could count as a fanwork in the broadest sense.

That's it, that's all I got. :D

Comments

[isabellerecs]

Thank you so much! It was definitely a learning curve, and I can see a difference in my first recs to what I did later. To be fair, there are times that I just "KITTENS!" or "HOT!!" or just generally flail about textually because I loved it but nothing really wants to come out. ;) But it is so nice to feel appreciated. *pinks*

[musyc]

I just want to reiterate here. I don't know how familiar you might have been with reccing culture on LJ back in the day but the people who did rec lists (whether general or themed) were so very appreciated. ESPECIALLY those who took the time, like you do, to give more details than a link. I'm grateful to someone who bothers to list fandoms, pairings, and ratings on fics they rec, much less someone who goes into the nitty-gritty. And TAGS. So wonderful.

The culture of reccing has really fallen off in the past several years, and I'm sad for that. There used to be a huge market in making recs - newsletters and comms and personal lists - and it made things easier to find. (I mean, the newsletters I follow won't even link to a fic unless it has two or three detailed recs, which are few and far between these days!)

So yeah, rambling, but doing recs is definitely a fanwork (and a lot of work it is). It's a service that is really, really underpraised.

[isabellerecs]

Wow, I needed a little bit to gather my words because . . . this means so much to me. I can't even tell you how much.

I was very familiar with LJ's rec'ing and it was that that had inspired me to do a rec site. I was on Epic Recs in '14, not quite dead but very slow, and I looked around and thought "I could do this, maybe not as detailed but I could." With LJ dying, I ended up on Tumblr. I followed a whole bunch of other rec blogs but they all seemed more concerned with who topped than with saying anything about the story (pet peeve, sorry). But even those have become scarce to nonexistent. I do hope that with the new energy here, that kind of rec'ing might make a comeback!

Oh tags, I love the tagging on WP it's so easy and one can tag to their heart's content (which for me is a lot). Organization and accessibility are important to me, I want people to be able to find what they're looking for as well as stumble upon things they never thought to look for (that's the library worker in me ;)).

I'll not feign modesty and pretend like it isn't a lot of work (because it is, you should see my spreadsheets), but oh, a comment like yours makes it all worth it because it feels like I'm accomplishing what I set out to do. Thank you a thousand times. <3<3<3