1) How did you first get into writing fanfic, and what was the first fandom you wrote for? What do you think it was about that fandom that pulled you in?"The X-Files" fandom: Talk about the Golden Age of fan fiction! Man, we started this art form
right!! With ‘Baby Internet’ still in formation, the X-Files fan fiction was high quality, no one phoning it in, it was FABULOUS. There was no online fan fiction before The X-Files.
Fortunately for me, because my mother worked for the IEEE, we had access to a great deal of technology before it became mainstream. I remember the day she told me to come downstairs (to her in home office) so she could show me this thing called, "America Online". "What is it?" I asked. "You can't describe it, just come down. It's incredible!" And she was right.
This was 1996, The X-Files had already been on the air for three years. It was the fanbase that soon occupied 1/3 of the entire Internet. it was this fanbase that pioneered internet fanfiction, shipper language that has become universal, and it was our persistence and quality writing that is the reason online fan fiction is legal today. I remember how terrified we were that we would be sued for posting fanfiction and how worried we were that at any second, it would all be taken down. Every time we posted a story, we had to be wary of big brother - something Mulder taught us about quite well.
We were quite brave, quite intelligent in proving our worth and validity in this new Internet age. I don't think any other fanbase will experience what X-Philers did. I remember the fans self-teaching themselves website design and photo/video editing before there was any such career field. Hell, it was before photoshop, before Google, and before social media. It was so much more personal. I miss it.
I was known as “The X-Files Girl” in my high school. It was a huge high school, and even though they didn’t know anything about me, they’d call out, “Hey X-Files girl!” “Yeah!?” lol. I used to bring printed outs of various fan fics to class so I could, you know….stay awake. Often they were NC-17. The teachers always thought I was the
most dedicated student as I read, always *studying*. I actually was dedicated. I won a special award in high school for ‘most conscientious’…I just happen to also have read a lot fan fiction. xD
I remember the woman who uploaded me the first X-Files fan fiction I ever read. She was a good fandom friend from Ohio named Rita Waters, and we were good friends for several years. When she used the term "fan fiction", I was completely lost on the concept. She tried to explain, "It's the fans writing stories of Mulder and Scully." I responded, "Errrr, like writing up transcripts? Or quotes of the characters?" "No, like our
own stories of the characters, as if we were the show's writers, but without the show." And I replied, "What's the point?" It sounded so pointless to me, as it would if you'd never heard of it. I mean what's the point if David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson aren't going to be acting it? I was only 13, and she was a grown woman with two teenage children. So she was extremely responsible about sending me NC-17 stories. She actually requested my mother send her an email authorizing her to share her favorite stories with me, some of them NC-17. My mother did so - 'cause my mom rocks - and Rita started sharing stories with me.
The first MSR fan fiction she ever sent me was "
Playing Goddess" by Shalimar. OMG, what a great story to begin with. This is one of my favorite X-Files fan fictions of all time. Now at the time, I was so young and so inexperienced with life and boys and romance and just plain...good writing, that even though I wrote dozens of X-Files stories, it's a HARD genre to write believably. Scully speaks with words that are literally not in the dictionary (like
"edematous", for example), and it's full of grown up concepts and themes. A 13-year old-child simply doesn't have the ability to do it justice. So I wrote them, posted them on
The Gossamer Project and later, removed all of them. They're still on my harddrive, I shudder sometimes re-reading my very first NC-17 fan fiction, but on my hard drive is where they shall stay.
Still, we
all owe every fan fiction we've ever written or read to the X-Files fandom. My shipper heart and soul began with the X-Files. The first characters I ever wrote were Mulder and Scully. My first muses, plot bunnies, and fandom friends were all born from the X-Files. It's quite incredible, when you think about it.
2) Name the fandoms you've written in, and how much you've written in that fandom, and if you still write in it.These don't quite match up with what's on my hard drive, but this is an accurate list of what I have posted online. Dozens of stories will remain unpublished, and for good reason -- they
sucked.
- X-Men Movieverse - 4 fics (various lengths), may write again
- Alias - 3 ficlets, may write again
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer - 1 ficlets, may write again
- General Hospital - 2 fics (various lengths), may write again
- Smallville - 14 fics (varous lengths), may write again
3) For each of the fandoms from day two, what were your favourite characters to write?Rogue and Wolverine of The X-Men come in second place. The whole X-Men universe was so vast and incredible with so many incredible characters to revolve around W/R that it really fed my creative energies for many happy years.
Tess and Oliver of Smallville come in first place. They still feed my creative energies and whenever a story comes into my mind, it becomes theirs instantly. They are so different than any other characters that I've written, and the height of their romantic and fiery passion is still the source of many of my latest fics.
( 30 days of fanfic writing questionsCollapse )
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thankful
busy
