My Fannish History

[mad_madam_m]

(Slightly edited from my answer on this post.)

The TL; DR version: Three meatspace friends and Sterek got me into fandom.

Long version (get a cup of tea and settle in):

Once upon a time, wee M was deeply, deeply in love with Star Wars. Wee M also thought it was bullshit that Luke didn’t end up with a girlfriend. So, since she had just received a hand-me-down desktop computer from her parents (Windows 3.1, y’all), she had the bright idea to write a version of the movies where he got one.

(I would say that character was a self-insert, but no, no, she was not. When I did a self-insert, I didn’t bother with any bullshit like fake names; I put my own ass in the story. Also, I gave myself superpowers, because why not.)

However, wee M was convinced that 1) what she was doing was a Bad Thing, and 2) that surely nobody else was doing this and it would be Terrible if anybody found out about it.

(Obviously, that is not true. But I had no way of knowing it wasn’t true and at that point, I understood what plagiarism was and had a vague notion of copyright, but not what transformative works were. So yeah. Assumption made, and nobody was around to educate me on the difference.)

Thus, that’s what I did for probably, oh, 10-12 years? When I got super into something—movies, TV shows, video games—I wrote fanfic for myself and hid it in the darkest recesses of my computer. Hell, I didn’t even know it was called fanfiction until I was well into college, and I’m sure most of y’all know how the mainstream media treated fanfiction/fandom up until recently (literally recently; I’ve seen the transition happen as I’ve actually been in fandom). So, you know, I didn’t actually see or read anything to disabuse the notion I’d formed at age 11 that what I was doing was wrong.

Then (and honestly, this phrase could be used to describe so many changes in my life), NaNoWriMo happened.

The third year I participated, I discovered the Fans & Critics forum, where (as you can probably guess by the name) fans gathered to flail about the stuff they loved. I jumped into a few discussions about TV shows I’d been into, and in one of the threads, people also started talking about what they shipped. Since everybody there seemed pretty chill, I asked the question that had been niggling at me for awhile: Why do people enjoy shipping things that aren’t canon or aren’t going to be?

It sparked a good discussion with several people talking about why they shipped what they did, and even though I was still like “oh, that’s probably not something I’ll ever do” (HA), I came away understanding it better.

That was also the year that I met two of my now-closest meatspace friends (one of whom is kalira) via in-person NaNo events, and they were both involved (or were getting involved) in fandom. So now I had two people I could see on a regular basis who were perfectly happy to ramble about fandom and fanfiction and didn’t mind me asking basic questions about it.

This continued for a few years (and I added another meatspace friend to the “is in fandom and will explain it to me” category), and I came around to the realization that the assumptions I’d carried around for ~15 years at that point were either flawed or flat-out wrong. But I was focusing a lot more on original writing at the time and I didn’t have any desire to write any fanfic.

Then a few things happened in early 2013:

1) A lot of my original stories got rejected within a very short period of time, which left me reeling, as you might imagine.
2) I finished my NaNo novel for that year—a fairly ridiculous cracky thing—and desperately needed a break.
3) One of my friends (ErisOReilly) had gotten into Teen Wolf, was stupid in love with Sterek, and was practically begging for one of us to watch it so she could have someone to flail with.

So, since I seriously needed a writing break, I watched the first two seasons of TW on Netflix. And I fell head over goddamn heels for Stiles and Derek.

But I wasn’t going to write fic for it. Oh no. I wasn’t going to do it. I was just going to browse Eris’s Tumblr and sigh over the pretty art. And maybe read some of the fics she reblogged. And then maybe seeing what fic writers she reblogged the most and start visiting their blogs. (I still didn’t have a Tumblr at this point.)

And then one of the things she happened to reblog was this prompt and I fucking screamed.

When the prompt wouldn’t leave me alone, I decided to write it as my NaNo novel for that year. After all, I’d finished three original novels that year (only one that I’d written in its entirety that year; one I was revising and the other I’d started the year before); I deserved a break.

And then I found out that Sheriff Stilinski and Johnny Cage were played by the same person (I love the Mortal Kombat movie, guys, you have no idea), and, after two different people encouraged me to do it, I ended up writing the first piece of fanfiction I’d written in seven years in a single afternoon.

I showed them, they both loved it, and they both said “Why don’t you post this?”

I debated it for a little while, and then decided it to go for it. It would be kind of a test; I could see how AO3 worked and have one fic up before I posted what would inevitably be a huge arranged marriage fic (probably 75k, at least) (HAHA oh 2013 me was adorable).

Kalira, God bless her, sent me an AO3 invitation code, I brought my laptop to her house, and she walked me through posting The Sheriff’s Secret, the first time in nearly twenty years of writing fic that I actually posted one. I remember being really surprised that people were reading and commenting on it, because I honestly thought it wouldn’t even make a blip.

Then on November 1, 2013, I started writing the first draft of what would become A Desperate Arrangement, and literally 15 minutes before the calendar ticked over to January 2014, I finally made a Tumblr.

And the rest, as they say,

is history.

So, if you guys take anything away from this long-ass ramble, let it be these things:

1) NaNoWriMo is awesome.
2) Keep an open mind, because you never know what flawed assumptions you’re holding on to.
3) You’re never too old to get into fandom.

Comments

[seleneheart]

Wow. That's . . . a lot of fic! Good for you!

[mad_madam_m]

:-D Thank you! That's actually an older image; I'm up to 338 now. >.> I like to say that I'm making up for lost time. XD