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Fanfiction has gone mainstream in recent years, as publishers have begun to realize sites like Archive Of Our Own (AO3) house thousands of potential novels. Books like Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis, originally a Kylo/Rey (from Star Wars) fanfic, prove that this pipeline can be very fruitful indeed.

As is often true with mainstream trends, straight romance novels have become the face of this burgeoning subgenre. But, as anyone who reads fanfic will tell you, AO3 is filled to the brim with queer stories, whether that be M/M fics, F/F fics, or anything in between (or beyond) that binary.

I’ve long been a fan of Jazz Forrester, (Jazzfordshire on AO3), one of the most prolific and highly-lauded writers in the SuperCorp fandom. For the uninitiated, SuperCorp is a ship from the CW series Supergirl, comprised of Supergirl herself (also known as Kara Danvers, played by Melissa Benoist) and Lena Luthor (lesbian fan-favorite Katie McGrath). As of this writing, there are more fics about SuperCorp on AO3 than any other F/F ship, and it’s been that way for several years now.

I wanted to speak with Jazz because she just turned her wildly popular SuperCorp mechanic AU – it has almost 275,000 hits and over 14,000 kudos – into a novel called Shifting Gears. I’ve always been curious about how one goes about adapting a fanfic into a novel, and I’m excited to get to shine a light on a lesbian example of this fanfic-to-novel trend. I asked Jazz about her proccess, her relationship with fanfiction and with other fans, and SuperCorp’s enduring popularity. I hope you enjoy our chat.

If you like Jazz’s work or want to read a great lesbian romance novel, you can purchase the E-Book of Shifting Gears here, and you can begin ordering hard copies from any book retailer on Wednesday, January 15.

What first drew you to writing fanfiction, and which fandoms/ships did you start with?

I've been reading fanfiction and lurking in fandoms since I was 11 or 12, so it's always been a big part of my life, but I never really considered that I could write it until I was 25 or so. It's hard to explain why, but I had this deep perception that while I was good at academic writing, I couldn't write fiction? Probably because I experimented with it a bit when I was a kid and it came out so bad that I assumed I was just terrible at it.

In terms of fandoms, I started out with Harry Potter like every other millennial, though that's now a thing of the past. I was very into Glee during its heyday, and I had a definite swanqueen spiral. But I didn't consider writing until I got into supercorp.

How did the idea of turning your SuperCorp mechanic AU into a full-length novel come to be?

It's not something I ever thought I would do. Usually turning a fic into a published work means doing heavy rewrites, and then sending it off with no guarantee of finding a publisher, or otherwise having to self-publish, both things I wasn't really interested in doing. Plus usually you're required to delete the original fic, which I never want to do. The only reason this has happened is because Ylva reached out to me directly asking if I would be interested, and hilariously, they offered the exact conditions it would take for me to agree and didn't require me to delete the fic. So here I am! It still doesn't feel very real.

Can you share a bit about what the process of turning the fic into a book was like? What was most difficult about that process?

It was a really interesting exercise. What I found the most fun about it was adding more backstory and moments of characterization to flesh the characters out. One of the major differences between fanfic and standalone novels is that you can often skip some of the early characterization in fic, because people already know the characters you're working with. The story originally being an AU was helpful in that regard, but still in order to make the characters stand out and be interesting without that context, I had to really explore them and put that on the page.

I think what was most difficult about it was the changes that needed to be made to the story and conflict to make it into something publishable. The story needs of a published romance novel are different than a piece of fanfiction, and the original fic is very easygoing in terms of conflict. It was a sweet wish fulfillment story. I had to really amp up the conflict, and even so I think it's still less conflict-heavy than most novels!

It was also super hard taking things out to make room for the stuff that had to be added. I had to go in with a hatchet and take out a lot of things that weren't adding to the conflict or the characters, a lot of fun little moments that I enjoyed in the fic but weren't necessary in the book purely for word count and story reasons. It's always hard taking things out!

Fanfic writers often talk about how supportive the fanfic community is. Have the responses and feedback from readers about your work kept you motivated to keep writing? How important is reader engagement to you?

Totally! Feedback from the community is what made me keep writing past that single first chapter of my very first fic. People said such nice and encouraging things, even though the story was very rough and my writing was inconsistent because I was a newbie. And to this day people are incredibly uplifting and encouraging in my comments, and it definitely inspires me to write more to pay them back for their kindness. It's always incredibly motivating to get positive feedback, and hear from people who enjoyed my work or found it meaningful in some way.

SuperCorp remains the most popular F/F ship on AO3 based on the number of fics written for the duo. Why do you think the ship captured – and continues to capture – so many fans and inspired so much writing?

I can really only speak to why I love them so much. For me, it's a mix of things - one is that this is one of those ships where I deeply love both characters. I find them fascinating both together and apart. The ways they deal with their traumas are so complimentary, they're each exactly what the other needs. There's this thread of tension and tragedy with the hidden identity aspect, and how they're such interesting foils for Superman and Lex Luthor. They're both studies in contrasts, with Kara being so outwardly sunny but having this very hurt interior after losing her planet, and Lena being outwardly guarded but having a very soft and vulnerable side that she really only shows to Kara at first. And then, of course, they're played by phenomenal actresses. It's an easy ship to fall into!

What do you make of the recent increase in fanfics being turned into novels? (Though, admittedly, most of the more popular ones are straight romances.) Do you think the general public is beginning to respect fanfiction more as a legitimate form of writing?

I think a lot of fanfics are really great story concepts, so as long as the work gets put into them to make them stand alone I think it makes sense to publish some of them! It's been happening for a lot longer than people realize, it's just that now people are being more open about it I think. And I think people in general are definitely becoming more aware of fanfiction, rather than it being a totally fringe thing. That can be both good and bad for various reasons, haha.

Who do you hope will read the book?

Anyone who might be interested! I hope people who liked the original story will still like this one with all the changes made, and I hope people who haven't read the original still find compelling characters in it that they can root for.

As a reminder, you can purchase the E-Book of Shifting Gears here, and you can start ordering hard copies from any book retailer on January 15!