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I have not yet slept. I will, soon, now that I've showered and the patter of the rain outside's offered a grey cast and the lull of raindrops conducive -- in my darkened room, blinds drawn -- to sleep.
First, I'm thinking about my fannish history, how it is, why it is that "fan" is my primary epithet, my most sincere definition. This -- here, ficwriting and television fandoms -- is just a step, another indication of this part of my personality made manifest.
My first Fandom was the Oz books (see: icon); I read The Land of Oz when I was three and far too young to be reading such things, but six months in a body cast for a dislocated hip, six months out of the first year of my life, got me talking early, and, so done, got me reading early. Nursery school I met SKL, in a way, my first fannish friend. The years of five and six years old we read the Oz books, over and over, used to write trivia questions for each other -- Who says, "look at my pink brains! You can see 'em work!" -- and we imagined ourselves part of that world, forging the lands and the seas with Trot and Button Bright and Cap'n Bill. We were with Dorothy when she helped the Wizard find twelve miniature monkeys, and train them to perform after jumping out of Ozma's birthday cake.
We read the books dog-eared, over and over, grabbed for other aspects of the canon -- truthfully, the 1939 MGM Wizard of Oz was the least fannish of all the Oz resources, too commercial, maybe, anyway, to us it was a speed bump on the way to more interpretive tales -- Fairuza Balk in Return to Oz was far more true to the feeling of the books; the Land of Oz PBS musical (which is so very hard to find, get it if you can, watch it if you can) spent more time with characters we knew, Tip, Mombi, Pumpkinhead, Dr. HM Wogglebug TE (where the HM stands for "Highly Magnified" as this was an insect of human proportions, and the TE stands for "Thorougly Educated" lest we forget he is, indeed, a Doctor and Philosopher).
That was fandom, though I might not have identified it as such till just now, this morning in the rain.
My next fandom, in the early elementary school years, were the Betsy-Tacy books -- ten of them, because "Betsy and the Great World" and "Betsy's Wedding" weren't readily available yet or were out of print at the time -- where I had a ritual of reading all ten books, four times a year. In early elementary, it took a couple nights to get through all ten; in later years (for, still, I go back and do this, to check in with my Betsy Warrington Ray from time to time) I'd do all ten books in a night, propped up on a pillow with a glass of water, maybe some sunflower seeds, and I'd read. I was a Betsy/Joe 'shipper, even if I didn't know it at the time, and I'd create stories for them, how they'd lived, what they'd done after High School and before the Great World. He sends her a telegram at the end of that book, after their long estrangement while she floated in Europe and he toiled back home at the newspaper and in the early 19-teens there was talk of war. He sent her a telegram, posted in the newspaper where she'd read it, because he knew she'd be afraid to come home to him after the 'shipper rift. "The great war is on," he wrote. "Ours is over. Come home. Joe."
Someone asked me my favorite fannish moments -- that's one of them.
My next fandom, going back, leaving early elementary school and starting Fifth grade, were Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain where we read the books in class, aloud, and Mr. McGuire always knew to pick me to read Eilonwy, I *was* Eilonwy, he got a great kick out of it when I signed my papers that way.
Mr. McGuire's responsible for a lot of my fannish participation; he taught me to write. And an assignment we had, one he'd selected for us, was to write a missing scene from the Prydain Chronicles. My very first fanfic ever was a tale of two wolves, Briavel and...the other one (help?) in Medwyn's valley, seeking solace as the dark forces of Arawn plagued the land. The "reveal," of course, as the danger passed and our heroes were safe, was that it was Eilonwy and Taran themselves, disguised as wolves, using the sanctuary of Medwyn's valley to avoid detection from the Cauldron Born. Hardly a unique or groundbreaking story by our fanfic standards, but I was ten, and I didn't know what fanfiction was, yet, I just knew I was writing, and I loved it, and I wanted to do it more.
I wrote like a maniac after that, short stories, personal anecdotes, fantasy tales set in worlds much like the ones I'd loved in Prydain and Oz. When we'd have writing assignments -- there was a sort of New York State Regents requirement, certain number of writing assignments per class, per year -- mine were always way over the limit, and I was given special dispensation to use the computer lab (these were Apple IIes, I think) to work on my stories long after the rest of the class had been dismissed. I cranked out sixty page novellas with characters and worlds as rich as the ones I'd loved in my previous fannish endeavors. I won little awards, the kinds of awards ten year olds win for these things, whatever they are.
I think if I had not had Mr. McGuire as a fifth-grade English teacher things would be quite different today. I think I would have found writing, and I've certainly found fandom, but the idea that this was something legitimized, something I'd be praised for, something I could *do* in *school* and get graded for...and they whispered, he whispered, "have you thought about writing as a career?" And I was ten and I said, "well, now I have."
Still to come...
Norton Juster and The Phantom Tollbooth
Nanci Griffith, Dar Williams and my experience in music fandom
Seven years as a clown and my experience in clowning fandom -- a long and complicated story that hinges on Andre Gregory and culminates in a production of Alice in Wonderland that came as a result of all the years I'd spent prior to that, fannishly learning
Then, of course, the internet came, and things changed, because now there's Prodigy BBS where people are talking to each other about Star Trek and that's astonishing -- I wrote a TNG script, enjoyed it, wrote another -- but didn't know anything about fanfiction as a practice till I entered that Strange New Worlds contest, lost, and then there was more internet and next thing I knew there was a newsgroup (Alt.Startrek.Creative and her sister group A.S.C.Erotica.Moderated) and people were sharing these things! So I brought in my lost Strange New Worlds story and for the first time it WAS fanfic, officially fanfic.
Newsgroups turned to Yahoogroups turned to LJs and the rest is history, but it's this early part I'm interested in.
These stories above, for another post.
I have to go to sleep now. It's early in the morning and I've got my Dark Tower cds waiting for me.
First, I'm thinking about my fannish history, how it is, why it is that "fan" is my primary epithet, my most sincere definition. This -- here, ficwriting and television fandoms -- is just a step, another indication of this part of my personality made manifest.
My first Fandom was the Oz books (see: icon); I read The Land of Oz when I was three and far too young to be reading such things, but six months in a body cast for a dislocated hip, six months out of the first year of my life, got me talking early, and, so done, got me reading early. Nursery school I met SKL, in a way, my first fannish friend. The years of five and six years old we read the Oz books, over and over, used to write trivia questions for each other -- Who says, "look at my pink brains! You can see 'em work!" -- and we imagined ourselves part of that world, forging the lands and the seas with Trot and Button Bright and Cap'n Bill. We were with Dorothy when she helped the Wizard find twelve miniature monkeys, and train them to perform after jumping out of Ozma's birthday cake.
We read the books dog-eared, over and over, grabbed for other aspects of the canon -- truthfully, the 1939 MGM Wizard of Oz was the least fannish of all the Oz resources, too commercial, maybe, anyway, to us it was a speed bump on the way to more interpretive tales -- Fairuza Balk in Return to Oz was far more true to the feeling of the books; the Land of Oz PBS musical (which is so very hard to find, get it if you can, watch it if you can) spent more time with characters we knew, Tip, Mombi, Pumpkinhead, Dr. HM Wogglebug TE (where the HM stands for "Highly Magnified" as this was an insect of human proportions, and the TE stands for "Thorougly Educated" lest we forget he is, indeed, a Doctor and Philosopher).
That was fandom, though I might not have identified it as such till just now, this morning in the rain.
My next fandom, in the early elementary school years, were the Betsy-Tacy books -- ten of them, because "Betsy and the Great World" and "Betsy's Wedding" weren't readily available yet or were out of print at the time -- where I had a ritual of reading all ten books, four times a year. In early elementary, it took a couple nights to get through all ten; in later years (for, still, I go back and do this, to check in with my Betsy Warrington Ray from time to time) I'd do all ten books in a night, propped up on a pillow with a glass of water, maybe some sunflower seeds, and I'd read. I was a Betsy/Joe 'shipper, even if I didn't know it at the time, and I'd create stories for them, how they'd lived, what they'd done after High School and before the Great World. He sends her a telegram at the end of that book, after their long estrangement while she floated in Europe and he toiled back home at the newspaper and in the early 19-teens there was talk of war. He sent her a telegram, posted in the newspaper where she'd read it, because he knew she'd be afraid to come home to him after the 'shipper rift. "The great war is on," he wrote. "Ours is over. Come home. Joe."
Someone asked me my favorite fannish moments -- that's one of them.
My next fandom, going back, leaving early elementary school and starting Fifth grade, were Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain where we read the books in class, aloud, and Mr. McGuire always knew to pick me to read Eilonwy, I *was* Eilonwy, he got a great kick out of it when I signed my papers that way.
Mr. McGuire's responsible for a lot of my fannish participation; he taught me to write. And an assignment we had, one he'd selected for us, was to write a missing scene from the Prydain Chronicles. My very first fanfic ever was a tale of two wolves, Briavel and...the other one (help?) in Medwyn's valley, seeking solace as the dark forces of Arawn plagued the land. The "reveal," of course, as the danger passed and our heroes were safe, was that it was Eilonwy and Taran themselves, disguised as wolves, using the sanctuary of Medwyn's valley to avoid detection from the Cauldron Born. Hardly a unique or groundbreaking story by our fanfic standards, but I was ten, and I didn't know what fanfiction was, yet, I just knew I was writing, and I loved it, and I wanted to do it more.
I wrote like a maniac after that, short stories, personal anecdotes, fantasy tales set in worlds much like the ones I'd loved in Prydain and Oz. When we'd have writing assignments -- there was a sort of New York State Regents requirement, certain number of writing assignments per class, per year -- mine were always way over the limit, and I was given special dispensation to use the computer lab (these were Apple IIes, I think) to work on my stories long after the rest of the class had been dismissed. I cranked out sixty page novellas with characters and worlds as rich as the ones I'd loved in my previous fannish endeavors. I won little awards, the kinds of awards ten year olds win for these things, whatever they are.
I think if I had not had Mr. McGuire as a fifth-grade English teacher things would be quite different today. I think I would have found writing, and I've certainly found fandom, but the idea that this was something legitimized, something I'd be praised for, something I could *do* in *school* and get graded for...and they whispered, he whispered, "have you thought about writing as a career?" And I was ten and I said, "well, now I have."
Still to come...
Norton Juster and The Phantom Tollbooth
Nanci Griffith, Dar Williams and my experience in music fandom
Seven years as a clown and my experience in clowning fandom -- a long and complicated story that hinges on Andre Gregory and culminates in a production of Alice in Wonderland that came as a result of all the years I'd spent prior to that, fannishly learning
Then, of course, the internet came, and things changed, because now there's Prodigy BBS where people are talking to each other about Star Trek and that's astonishing -- I wrote a TNG script, enjoyed it, wrote another -- but didn't know anything about fanfiction as a practice till I entered that Strange New Worlds contest, lost, and then there was more internet and next thing I knew there was a newsgroup (Alt.Startrek.Creative and her sister group A.S.C.Erotica.Moderated) and people were sharing these things! So I brought in my lost Strange New Worlds story and for the first time it WAS fanfic, officially fanfic.
Newsgroups turned to Yahoogroups turned to LJs and the rest is history, but it's this early part I'm interested in.
These stories above, for another post.
I have to go to sleep now. It's early in the morning and I've got my Dark Tower cds waiting for me.
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