Hello! First things first, I found your blog in the aftermath of His Last Vow and now it’s absolutely one of my favourites. :) The second thing, do you have any advice for someone who’d like to write meta about a television series (at the moment Sherlock) but doesn’t have enough followers to create proper conversations? My writing is good enough, of that I’m quite sure, but talking to yourself is hardly satisfying. Thanks a lot!

YES YES WRITE THE META.  I dunno if people think I’m working some magic trick here, but it’s just thinking. 🙂  It’s a simple matter of thinking through what you see and the implications and then laying out what you think and why. 🙂

(Organizing your thoughts can be a bear, though.)

I am not sure I have good advice for what to do when you don’t have many followers.  That never stopped me.  But all of fandom is an ongoing conversation, and I engage with it in a lot of ways when I do meta.  Sometimes I post a new post because I have a question and a theory as to how to answer it, so I write an essay.  Sometimes I reblog and add meta onto an existing post, because it makes me think of something.  Sometimes I offer rebuttals to somebody else’s meta.  Sometimes I watch fandom scroll by, talking, and the conversation makes me think of something, like an alternative read to the one I see dominating the conversation—like my ‘There is no pining!Sherlock’ essay.

It’s all dialogue.  And somebody is listening.   Having those conversations is one of the things that brings people to you.  It can take a while—in fact the level of discussion and questions you guys are giving me is new for me this season!—but when you post good meta, you’re likely to attract the kind of people who like to think and talk about it. 😀