I'm Not Dead Yet

A research paper required of me three things: time, effort and stability.  I had only 1 of the 3, and I'll give you a hint: its effort.  BUT.  That's not my real point.  My real point is the nature of the research process.  My topic for class was on the subject of fan work, mostly because I'm the most familiar with the practices and its something I enjoy doing (if my now neglected DA account is of any indication, though a glut of it is original work).  As an amateur artist with dreams of everything big, shiny, and hopefully merchandisable, I see fan art as being a good outlet that has practical, if not artistic, merit.

Therefore I centered my paper on the nature of fan work, starting from the traditional fan fiction and fan art, all the way up to the professional level of sampling in music, notably DJs (including but not limited to Pogo, Fatboy Slim, and Daft Punk).  I still do have some filling in to do, but overall, I think I got a good foundation for the case for fan work as legitimate work.

The research part was a might difficult, since I was on the prowl for topics that included a fair and wide amount of information on fan fiction (there was little that i could find on fan art as of this week) and a few articles on the subject of sampling for music.  Both searches were a bit frustrating, since it was difficult to locate both credible sources of papers on the subjects (though I did find a few written by a very well read and statistic armed writer whom was lucky enough to discuss her work with the scholar Henry Jenkins, a leading voice on the nature of fan fiction), and to find complete articles.  I did use ILL, but the downside is the fact that one might have to order their materials from another library, which will add time to your researching (time one like me didn't have in luxury).

However, the articles I was able to locate were both interesting (FINALLY, some articles that weren't Sahara dry in content and prose) and extremely helpful in my case.  It also help lead me to other sources of reading for side subjects I didn't get to fully touch on in my essay (namely the divisive nature of fan fiction regarding romance/shipping, the gender divide, etc).  This paper also gave me plenty of privalage in pimping artists like Captainosaka, or Nathan Maurer, and Pogo, and pimping work such as Maurer's Double K, and the show There Will Be Brawl.  Only because I'm a mega-nerd like that. :)

Overall, the research was fruitful, but only through sheer perserverance, which is akin to just straight up effort.  Yay for that.  I just want to polish the paper a bit better so maybe I can use it elsewhere.  I think it'd be a nice article to write somewhere.