The best literature for a bored PCV...

I have discovered the secret to being entertained when alone at your site, without internet access, TV, or friends. Sure you can read a book, but we PCV’s usually only have limited supplies of books, so if you read all the time, you would run out, and pretty quickly too (especially if you’re like Ecuador and have no volunteer library at headquarters because someone threw them all out, claiming they were taking up too much space.) All you need is a laptop (most of you have those, right?), and a flash drive.

What is the secret to hours of free reading pleasure? Fanfiction.

Yes, fanfiction. Probably all of you who are not giant nerds like myself don’t know what that is. Fanfiction is when someone takes a preexisting story, like a book or a movie or a television show, and expands on it, turning it into a sort of online book and posting it to a website. Yes, it’s nerdy, I know. I write it (and am pretty popular, too, in my chosen fandom), so of course I know. But think about it for when you are bored. Have a favorite book or tv show where you reallllyyyy wanted two characters to hook up but never did? I’m sure you’ll find many stories online about that, no matter how obscure the pairing. Favorite character died and you wish that hadn’t happened? Alternate realities where they live, happily or not so happily ever after, exist in droves. Really hate a character and want them to die? There’s that too. Or maybe your favorite series ended or your favorite book didn’t wrap things up the way you wanted, and you wished it could have gone on a little longer. Fanfiction!

Now I have to be responsible and warn you all: Most of what is out there is utter crap. Serious, steaming piles of poo. Just awful. And there’s porn, too. Lots of it. Oddly enough, there’s a thriving amount of gay porn in the Harry Potter sections. Good news is, you can often sort by rating, from K, which is good for all ages, all the way up to M, mature. On sites like fanfiction.net, the largest (and it is HUGE) listing of all the fanfiction you could ever want, you can even sort by character, pairing, length, and published date. It’s fun. And if you look, and sometimes it takes a little looking, you can find real gems. I have read fanfictions that far surpass most published books I have ever read, that made me laugh out loud and cry, sob actually, or gasp at my computer screen. Some talented authors can take the most trivial, stupid stories (like, children’s anime, or bad 80s movies) and somehow turn them into the most breathtaking works of near-genius. There are also smaller communities where stories are screened for quality before they are allowed to post, so no crap there.

So what do you do? Take a flash drive with you when you go to the internet café, go to fanfiction.net, and start looking up stories. When you find one that’s decently long and the first chapter looks pretty good (proper punctuation, people in character, not too much purple prose or Mary-Suing, though you probably don’t know what that is…) copy and paste the chapters onto Word. It takes only a few minutes. It took me years to figure out that if I highlighted the top of the story, then went to the bottom, held shift, and clicked on the end of the story, the whole thing would highlight for me. Pretty simple, but I’m kinda absentminded sometimes, and spent years highlighting and scrolling through ridiculously long chapters to copy it. This way is a lot faster.

With about fifteen minutes of copy-pasting onto a word document, you’ve got hours upon hours of reading pleasure, and there are more genres and more stories out there than you could ever read. It never runs out, and damn, is it fun. After a while you might want to stave off boredom by trying your hand at writing one. I tell you, there is nothing more fulfilling than posting a chapter and having loyal readers rejoice that you have returned after a six month absence (ahem, I’m not that frequent of a poster), or compliment you on your story, or even offer constructive criticism. It’s fun, and it’s a great stress reliever. I’m finishing up a chapter towards the end of a book-length story now, and am looking forward to posting once again.

So get to it!