I’ve been writing fanfiction for at least a smooth two decades. It was always a very natural thing to do, as a lot of books, movies and TV shows didn’t do what I needed or expected them to do and I felt the need to correct the oversights. The main thing was the scarcity of WoC. So I did what came natural: I created an OC (original character) to supplement what I felt the original story/movie/TV show lacked. I didn’t do this with every fanfic I wrote; only with the ones I felt required it.
When the Internet became a thing and I learned that I was not the only one writing fanfiction, I nearly had a baby with a red dress on because…well, just because. Anyhoo, there wasn’t anywhere I could post my particular fanfiction because I always paired my white male protagonist with sistahs, and the jerks who maintained the fanfic communities I was in had issues with that. The pairing wasn’t “authentic,” or “canon,” or any of that restrictive garbage. So I created a simple website to post some of those fics, and some innanet gangster told me that one particular story was "shit;" that said character (Riddick from Pitch Black) would NEVER be with my OC and I "should never write anything ever again."
*snorts* Take a moment, let that marinate.
Anyhoo, there was NO SAFE SPACE for a fanfic-loving sistah like myself to post my sistah-OC fanfics. It never stopped me from doing my thing, because writing is breathing, and I will never suffocate myself. When I returned to fanfiction in December of 2009, I was deep in the ST fandom and I didn’t have to create a sistah OC; she already existed. Nyota Uhura, in case you were wondering. I won’t belabor the point of how I went from ff.net and LJ to having blogs solely dedicated to my stories.
I say all this because today, over on The Black Girls’ Club, Leo Princess made mention of the existence of a website just for sistahs who write IR fanfiction and original fiction with WoC protagonists. The site in question is called The Chamber, and it is a community with 3100 members and about 1400 stories. I’m so happy about this. There are few places on the Internet where sistahs have a safe place to do what we do. I’m quite sure that the moderators and administrators have had to deal with white women sneaking in and throwing shade (just because they don’t know how to leave us alone), and I hope they promptly told those interlopers to suck an ocean liner’s worth of disease-ridden genitalia and get off their site.
I have no plans to join The Chamber. Takeshi and Kameko & Max and Bane would be right at home over there, but I’m quite satisfied with where they are now. But I encourage my fanfic-writing sistahs who are looking for a place to share their work to visit The Chamber and get your life. I wish I could have had access to such a community back in the antediluvian days when I wrote my fics longhanded or on word processors that required the use of a floppy disc. But hey, better late than never.
