(no subject)

[the_rck]

Day 5

In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story. How did you come to fandom, why did you choose your fannish name, do you have more than one secret identity? Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I had a close brush with fanfic as a teenager when I considered writing a Mary Sue inspired by a Star Trek book I'd just read (it ended with a cliffhanger that was never resolved because the next book, as far as I know, never came out). I had a friend who was both a Trekkie and a Spockie. She would happily have read anything I produced, I suspect, but I never got beyond the first paragraph or two. There were too many interesting books to read. This was during the early 1980s, so I had no way of knowing that people wrote fanfic or what it was.

I attended a few local SF cons during college and during the first few years after, but cons were expensive, and I didn't tend to talk to anybody there, so they were hard to justify.

I encountered fanfic again when I joined a writers' group after college. I was the only person in the group who didn't write fic. I didn't understand fanfic then and wasn't really comfortable with it. I actually asked one person why she didn't write original fic instead. I simply didn't get it. During those years, I was almost exclusively writing LARPs. I couldn't bring myself to write anything else. (The reasons for that are complicated, and I won't go into them here.)

Then, around 2000 or 2001, I lost my job. It had been a long time coming. I was sick almost constantly, and my anxiety was so high when I was at work that I was suicidal. I ended up on disability. I was at home all day with nothing but time on my hands, and I needed something to do. I went through a lot of library books and bought some books that I wouldn't have otherwise. I also watched a lot of TV.

I started watching The Pretender. They were airing an episode a day on, I think it was, TNT, and I was hooked. The show really captured my imagination. Scott, wanting to encourage me to be engaged rather than depressed, did a little poking around online and found a big archive of Pretender fanfic (that archive no longer exists. Some of the fics do, but many were lost). I started reading. I think I tried at least one story by every author in the archive.

I didn't feel moved to write then, but I was very interested in the new world I discovered, and Scott and some of my friends were encouraging me to write something, anything. I wasn't ready for that, but, having gone through the Pretender archive, I started searching for fic in other places.

That was in a time when a lot of people had individual websites and posted their fic there, so I wandered through a lot of websites, looking for fandoms I recognized. I don't remember where I found my first piece of Weiss Kreuz fic, but I do recall that I had only seen four episodes of the show at that point in time. I thought that was enough; it really wasn't, but I figured out a lot about canon from the fics I read. Weiss Kreuz fics captured my imagination and sent me looking for the canon.

I read in a lot of different fandoms, many of which I knew very little or nothing about beyond what I found in the fic. Somewhere along the line, I started wondering if I could write again. I had two fic ideas. One was an epic Rurouni Kenshin AU that would deviate during the Kyoto Arc and go in what I still consider to be interesting directions. I just lacked the skills to write parts of that. The other idea wasn't really even an idea; it was a challenge to myself. I wanted to see if I could write a sex scene of some sort, of any sort. That experiment produced the first chapter of Rheotaxis, and I found out there was a lot more story to tell. (The origins of Rheotaxis can still be seen in the working titles for each chapter-- [chapter number]wks for Weiss Kreuz smut.)

I was really nervous when I started posting Rheotaxis because I was going against a good portion of the fanon I'd seen with regard to one of the characters. I was afraid I'd get flamed for writing him as a bad guy. It didn't happen. This was right around the time that fanfiction.net banned explicit stories, and I was writing an obscure pairing (to this day, I've only seen one or two other fics that pair those two characters), so mailing lists weren't an option. I considered posting to Mediaminer, but I couldn't figure out how to do so. All of that meant that I posted only to my website. Somehow, I got readers anyway.

Somewhere in there, I started a recs page on my website. I posted an awful lot of recs in an awful lot of fandoms (I haven't updated that since 2008. I want to get back to it. I'm just lacking the activation energy to start again). I think the recs site was more popular than any fic I've ever written.

My second fic was for Yuletide. That was the year when newcomers were required to write a New Year's Resolution story in order to be allowed to participate. I'm not sure how I became aware of Yuletide, but I thought it looked like a lot of fun, so I wrote Impedimenta in order to be able to participate. Fulcrum, the story I wrote for that Yuletide, was my third story. I really haven't looked back since.

Comments

[analise010]

WOW! This was very interesting. I think a lot of us were a little apprehensive about fandom in the beginning, but came around.

OMG. THE FANDOM MAILING LISTS. The 90's were one hell of a drug, weren't they?

[the_rck]

I came in around 2000, so the mailing lists were dying. They weren't gone, but people were moving on. I might still be subscribed to a couple of mailing lists that haven't had new posts in about ten years. I'm not sure.

I'm still occasionally apprehensive about fandom. I feel like I dabble a bit without getting into serious fandom. I lurk mostly, and when I write, I write in obscure corners.