How on Earth does Ms. Lear expect us to take her seriously? She writes an entire piece on how she gets no respect, but she ignores or leaves out the myriad awards she's gotten in the four years she's been writing.

(Yeah, "Cordy." You shouldn't have left that phrase in your piece. Google's a detective's best tool!)

Nobody should take any of her whining seriously. She's a liar and a coward.

-- SunnyBunny

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Please. How many of these "fans get no respect" articles do we have to suffer through. YES, we get that you're smart. YES, we get that fans are an important subculture. But honestly? It's FAN fiction. Real fans know that thinking about and writing about their favorite shows is all they need. Being a fan is zen. Anyone who's surprised to find out they can't make a living at it just got a reality check.

-- Wesley Crushyourhead

Reading Ms. Lear's "Confessions" reminds me why I retired from fandom. At no point in the article does she demonstrate the slightest passion for or fluency in Angel canon despite her protests to the contrary. The fans who shout about their loyalty are always the most ignorant, and the fanfic writers who claim they're good are always overcompensating. That generalization more than applies to Ms. Lear, and people like her are why I got banned from message boards and began hating _Angel_.

-- Angerdoll

As someone who operates one of the busiest fanfic repositories on the World Wide Web, I find it very hard to muster the necessary sympathy for Ms. Lear. She's not the only gifted writer out there, not in Angel or any other fandom, and complaining that Angel fans are singled out for picking on because some showrunner didn't pick up her script is appallingly self-centered.

Fans are ignored and disrespected no matter the show. It's the television industry's dirty secret, and does more to explain declining rating for shows than any so-called rise in programming alternatives ever will.

-- Linda Allery

Cordelia Lear's article is dull, patronizing, self-indulgent and toothless. She seems to be under the impression that the world is conspiring against her, instead of recognizing that she's been the victim of a technoswindle designed to lull her -- and other television-watching sheep like her -- into believing that the media arm of the One World Order is ever going to respond to one drone's creative new ideas.

She should be addressing the larger problem: thanks to relentless corporate capitalism and mergers, we are all victims of media, forced to suck passively at the teat of TV instead of creating a vibrant and egalitarian new story-telling culture. Kill your TV, and begin telling stories anew.

-- Noam Jenkins

If Cordelia Lear were really serious about making a difference in stories, she'd actually go to work in the TV industry instead of waiting for it to come to her.

-- Diane Dennison

As a fanfic author, but not an Angel fan, I find it immensely amusing that the sidebar she entitles "5 things you can do to save fanfic" is all about Angel.  I guess I'm not writing fanfic, since I'm not writing Angel.  Or maybe it's just another example of that disrespect she mentioned, maybe fanfic isn't worth saving, only Angel fic.  Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm writing fanfic - not to win awards, get recognition, or have people tell me I'm a great writer - I'm writing because I enjoy it, I like to make up stories about the characters I love, and I'll do it whether or not anyone ever reads them.  Maybe Ms. Lear should rethink why she's writing fanfic.

-- Danae Cassandra

I just read Cordelia Lear's ridiculous piece, "Confessions of a Semi-Successful Fanfic Writer". I'm confused as to why your organization would publish such a whiny, self-indulgent rant, and treat it as if it deserved serious attention.

For starters, Ms. Lear displays an appalling ignorance regarding the world of professional writing, most particularly the world of writing for TV. If she were truly serious about writing as a career, she would know that almost no television production in Hollywood accepts unsolicited or unagented submissions. Furthermore, the usual practice in applying to write for a show is to submit sample scripts written for other shows. On top of that, every fiction writer should have an original work or two in their repertoire - not just 'play with other people's characters'. Professionals would then attempt to get those original works published. Has Ms. Lear done any of this?

Even if she had, rejection is a fact of life in writing for a living - Ms. Lear would still have to deal with it. Which, quite clearly, she does not know how to do.

I am an erstwhile fanfic writer myself. I have received the adoring emails and the awards (I still wear the Buffy stake necklace I won for writing a Buffy/Eco-challenge crossover in the Bronze's first ever fanfic writing contest). But it was always clear to me that fanfic was, at best, a useful pastime for practising techniques I could use later in my original work. The praise and the awards helped to build my confidence so that I could go forward in my own writing - but I never considered them as any kind of 'proof' that I should write for Angel or BtVS. I also never forgot that what I was doing was a copyright violation and something of an infringement upon Joss Whedon's sovereignity over his creation, and so I tried to respect the characters and universe as he wrote them - even if I didn't agree with all the plot twists and turns.

The long and short of it is, fanfic is a pleasant and interesting part of fandom. It is not in any way a path to a professional writing career, and Ms. Lear was seriously deluded to think it might be so.

-- S. Neuteboom