Sunshine

[cornerofmadness]

Frankly there's too much right now (it's 90 degrees and it's not even noon!) So my fannish identity. Boy has that changed over the decades.

First off my user name isn't fannish at all. I hate to admit it, I didn't want to go online back in the day, seriously. I resisted email for years (god knows why. I think I loved writing letters and didn't want to lose it) and I absolutely didn't want to have a blog because it was no one's business what I did (I had to do this for a class believe it or not and it was a different blog that I can't even remember the name of). I transitioned to LJ because Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom moved from yahoo groups and online forums to LJ. By then I was a little more willing to be online. My name, I felt, captured my life. It was a horrible time for me. Hell I thought I started this blog (now homed on DW and mirrored to LJ thanks to their Russian overlords) earlier than I did. In 2004, I had just retrained to teach after the hand injury robbed me of my dreams of being a surgeon. Recently looking for long lost BtVS/AtS fic I reread a lot of 2004-2005, and not sure how I survived it. Anyhow cornerofmadness resonated with me but it turns out it was actually the title of the editorial column in my undergrad's newspaper. I had a crush on the editor as a freshman and I guess it lodged in my brain forgotten until I found an old paper when I was cleaning out boxes I had stored at grandma's.

Anyhow, my name isn't fannish which in a way is good. I don't feel like changing it as my fandoms change. I started in fandom back in 1977 after seeing Star Wars for my 10th birthday. It was as bad as you'd imagine, a self-insert named Crystal Diamond, relative to Luke and had her eyes set on Han. (cut me a break, I was 10 but I still remember it. I have a lot of them somewhere in a box on decaying paper). I shared them with people at school and another girl started writing with me in my world.

By the time I was 12/13 I wanted to be in Star Trek fandom. These were the paper zine days. ST fandom was older than me in general and I felt a bit bullied and left out. I was never in any of the zines (probably rightfully so but it hurt).

But at that same time period, I found Elfquest much of fandom was at least teen aged. And from there in a few years I jumped in Pern fandom. This is where I had my first true fannish identity. I wrote a lot. Most of it was surely bad but this is where I learned and it was a MUCH safer place to do it than online. It was a more innocent identity back then too because all of us had our physical addresses in the zine because you were meant to write someone to use their characters. I know that sounds weird but both EQ and Pern allowed fandom but NOT use of the actual characters so everyone created their own. It was really a great lesson in how to create characters. Honestly I couldn't have asked for a better way to learn to write, these fandoms and the people there in taught me a lot. Some of them I'm still friends with since the 80s.

My first online persona was within Buffy fandom. (again coming later than I thought. I swore I got on FFN in 98 in Madison WI but nope, 2001 in Cassadaga FL) I wrote dozens of stories and no doubt a 100 or more drabbles. I have at least a dozen WIPs that now 15+ years later I'm trying to finish (I also learned a lesson about pubbing WIPs, don't do it). I followed the Buffyverse over various forums but when it came to Tumblr I never made the jump (I disliked it so never got into it).

Unfortunately I was naïve back then and also we didn't even have flashdrives in common use (I didn't have one until 2004) Between corrupted floppy discs, damaged CDs and crashed hard drive I've lost at least two dozen of my Buffyverse stories. Hopefully by the end of the year, I'll have a full list of them but I doubt they're anywhere to be found. All the old angelfire, GeoCities, etc etc websites are long gone. Some disappeared from FFN (I have no idea why. I did remove any NC-17 content when they asked so naturally the explicit stories are all gone) Some were never put there. So a lot of that identity died an ignoble death but I think I did well. I had a lot of award fanfics for whatever that means. It was a good ego boost if nothing else.

I transitioned from the Buffyverse to Fullmetal Alchemist. I've been into anime and manga since the 70s but none captured my creativity like FMA. It's another fandom I wrote scads for, there's probably close to 100 stories there too. During the FMA years, I wrote tons of other anime but the second biggest was Saiyuki.

So my fannish identity of the last 20 years has been Buffyverse/FMA/other anime. Yes I dabbled in other shows like Star Trek, The X-Files and Lucifer. Until this time last year I slowed greatly in fandom because I am devoting time to my original writing. I've done FAR too little of it this year as Buffyverse has reclaimed my soul.

But in a way I'm okay with that. It's been a horrible year. Original fiction takes too much of my mental abilities. Fanfic is easier so I'm giving myself a bit of a time off.

So that is me. If any of that interests you, I gladly accept questions.

Comments

[oldtoadwoman]

So much of early Internet fandom has been lost. I have all my finished fic from back then, but a lot of works-in-progress were lost forever. What I mourn the most are references. Someone had a full academic analysis of the show I was into with photos and details, just complete over-the-top meta. It was a great place to go when you wanted photo references for fanart or a quick fact-check of details for writing a fic. And now it's just all gone.

My only connection to Elfquest was having a crush on a kid in high school who drew Elfquest fan art. I was so honored when he gave me a photocopy of one of his drawings. I don't even know who the character was, I just thought it must be cool if he liked it. :-)

[cornerofmadness]

It does hurt that all that is lost. I try to impress that on my students, back up everything in many places and don't expect it to be there online the next time. It's a shame that SO much was lost.

A friend of mine was an academic at the time, did a lot of work with Buffy fandom. I hoped she had it but no, she did not. I can't find anything I need on the wayback machine. sigh. Until the last several months I had no idea how much I lost and now that I do it hurts to know it.

As far as the Buffy fandom went there are still the wikis but SO much of those are dedicated to the comics that I don't even care about and the actual show isn't dealt with in any detail.

Elfquest was good for the first few big arcs (and I do mean big) but after several years it fell apart (for me) and I drifted away from reading it but kept my hands in the fandom for years.

[pauraque]

EQ and Pern allowed fandom but NOT use of the actual characters so everyone created their own

Huh, interesting! Was that because it was what the zine publishers wanted, or were they trying to make nice with the EQ and Pern creators? (A friend of mine ran a Pern fan site in the early web days that got shut down by Anne McCaffrey's lawyers, so I'm guessing it was the latter.)

[cornerofmadness]

Honestly I don't know. We didn't have information as freely 30 years ago as we do now. I've always assumed that the creators wanted it that way. McCaffrey was good with fandom for years then in the mid 90s changed her mind. I got one of those letters myself from her lawyers.

[pauraque]

I checked back and found that the friend I was talking about, skywaterblue (who, I'm afraid, passed away a couple of years ago herself) wrote something about those experiences and the continuing influence of Pern on fandom on the occasion of McCaffrey's death. Thought you might find it interesting as a Pern fan from Way Back.

[cornerofmadness]

Thanks for this (sorry about your friend though) McCaffrey was important. I've used her, Andre Norton and Ursula leGuin as a defense for women writing SF (after these last years of Sad Puppy attacks on women in SFF)

[thenewbuzwuzz]

That was super interesting, thank you for writing it up!

This part in particular blew my mind:
"all of us had our physical addresses in the zine because you were meant to write someone to use their characters"

"a lesson about pubbing WIPs, don't do it"
It does seem to work really well for some authors. I'm thinking of OffYourBird from Elysian Fields, who posts everything before it's finished, finishes everything, and says she much prefers having readers interact with a story while it's still "living". Buuuut probably a good lesson for most! :)

THAT being said, personally I'd rather read part of a brilliant story than nothing. An unfinished WIP isn't a huge deal to me as a reader, though I know this varies a lot.

[cornerofmadness]

Right? and if you wanted to interact with other fans like we're doing now, you had to write a letter and mail it. (god I'm old)

Pubbing WiPs can work for some. I used to get off on the praise for every chapter but now that I'm busier than I used to be (somehow since this job is much easier, I suspect it's just that I'm older)

It definitely varies for readers. I know people who won't read a book series until it's finished. I can't even imagine that

[silveradept]

Pern is definitely the hatching ground for a lot of fans, I'm finding. And that makes the relationship with it somewhat complicated, given how Anne was not always a fan of her fans.

Going back and reading has been an exercise in "ah, that's what they mean by the Suck Fairy," but also, a good way of seeing what sort of potential might happen out of a good story that had some less-good executions.

[cornerofmadness]

That is very true of Pern fandom.

I've learned that what I wrote in the 90s and early 2000s was still pretty good. I'm not sure I'd want to go back to the stuff in the 80s

[enemytosleep]

Having known you for some time now I've heard a lot of this already before, but I still love hearing about the paperzine days because I used to be involved in non-fandom zines back in Boston that were a mishmash of feminist/vegan interests. We had to mail things around and/or go to meet ups to grab a printed copy. It certainly was a different time!

[cornerofmadness]

Yeah it's a story I've told before.

The paper zine days were something else. Your zines sound a lot like what we were doing fannish and even my writers group did that back in the 90s. We lost several who got upset we were going online but come on it was SO much cheaper.

Evil little dog ran a shared universe of her (and our) creation in the 90s that we did by mail but most of us were already friends. I really would like to do something with that some day

[enemytosleep]

Now i'm thinking of the lost potential there was for paper FMA stuff back in the 2008-2012 era when LJ was so active. Ah well, maybe that'll be my next passion project.

[cornerofmadness]

That could be interesting

[meridian_rose]

The loss of fannish artefacts is always sad and disappointing. As a fan you can't save everything you consume - I stopped downloading so much when I had broadband rather than dialup but soon realised I needed to still archive fave fics, vids, etc, because you never know when they'll get deleted or the site goes down. I still lose things. Thanks to the photobucket debacle I lost a couple of images I'd made, I'm usually more obsessive about backing up my own work!
Thanks for sharing your story. I do think fanfic is sometimes easier than original fic for a whole host of reasons, and can't imagine ever giving up fic for original work though I try to consistently write both these days.

[cornerofmadness]

It is hard to lose the fannish stuff. Things are easier now at least when it comes to storage options vs 15 years ago which is good. Sorry you lost your images too.

I do try to do some fanfic still (mostly on the holidays) but with a full time job and publishers expecting things timely I don't have as much time as I once did.