Fandom Snowflake Challenge, Day 2
Continuing the meme/challenge begun and tracked here.
Fandom Snowflake Challenge, Day 2
In your own space, talk about your fannish history. Leave a comment here saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
If the question regards how I got my start in fanfic, I’ve answered that one already a few times before (here and here most prominently). I can’t think of anything to add to those recountings, though you’re welcome to re-read them for the information, so I believe I’ll follow a different tack with this question.
Fannish history … how I got to where I am …
I’ve always been a big, huge geek, and in the first years of my life that was centered primarily on comic books (though that didn’t stop me from reading all the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Tarzan, and assorted sci-fi I could find). When I say comic books, my tastes were hardly discriminating: everything from Mickey-and-Donald — with extra help from Uncle Scrooge and Hewey, Dewey, and Louie — through the Green Hornet, the ‘classic’ comics featuring the Shield and the Fly and the Mighty Crusaders, Archie and its subsidiary Little Archie …
That was what I did for entertainment. What pulled me into fandom was superhero comics. Particularly from Marvel. As I recall, it was right around 1967 that the hooks really sunk in, when I discovered the first Fantastic Four annual I’d ever seen … which was, in fact, only the fourth that particular title had ever done. I was just old enough to start taking a concentrated interest in this stuff, and Marvel’s shared universe — characters not just guest-starring in each other’s titles but frequently sharing crossovers between titles — came across as more intimate and interconnected than DC’s. I became a full-fledged fanatic practically overnight, and that lasted … oh, roughly twenty years.
Even with the Marvel superhero universe commanding the majority of my attention, I had plenty left over, but my new experience with fandom immersion had me paying particular attention to series. The entire run of the Tarzan books, and most of the Pellucidar books. Various Doc Savage titles. Dumarest of Terra. The increasingly-lower-quality-but-continued-to-be-entertaining M*A*S*H sequels that pushed the main characters into the ‘modern’ age. Heck, I even purchased and enjoyed the three segments in the brief “Mouse That Roared” series (did anybody else even know there were sequels?). Back then paperbacks were a lot cheaper, and even less so in used bookstores, and I built my own library out of such semi-compulsive pursuits.
And I enjoyed television series, too, quite a bit, and followed quite a few. I still reminisce about Richard Anderson’s claim to fame: a series regular as the same character (Oscar Goldman) on two different prime-time series (the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman), on two different networks (ABC and NBC) at the same time. In today’s cable and streaming free-for-all, something like that might not be so remarkable, but back then it was — as far as I can tell — unprecedented.
My start in ‘fanfiction’ itself (air quotes because the term didn’t exist yet) made my involvement in fandom more personal but didn’t actually expand that involvement; I just did occasional self-insertion fics along with my other fannish pursuits. Didn’t reach out to other fans, didn’t take part in any events, nothing.
Involvement in the fannish community itself began with Buffy. I’m not sure how, actually; it wasn’t an accident, I know I set out to join in with this new rowdy bunch, but I no longer remember the actual beginning process. Probably it started with sending feedback to other authors I’d enjoyed, and wheedling them to consider my own stories; being admitted to the Sunnydale Slayers was a major step for me at the time, but that site gradually faded as most of its members moved on to other pursuits. The involvement got a solid boost when — after more than a year of being irritated by it — I joined LiveJournal, where the feedback system and site-to-site commenting lent itself beautifully to that kind of interplay.
I attended the first two WriterCons: Las Vegas (2004) with my daughter sroni, Atlanta (2006) with my son. That was the high point; everything I’ve done since has been a matter of continuing writing-and-reading-and-commenting, without the extra effort needed to go meet people.
Since my extended start, I have full collections of my fanfic at my own site, LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, Fanfiction.net, and Archive of Our Own, with partial collections at I Need a Parrot, Daughters of Sineya, and Twisting the Hellmouth.
I’ve been writing in Buffy fandom for twenty years now. I’ll keep at it for a bit longer, because there are still stories I want to tell … but, honestly, I’m getting to where I wish I could just tell them, and be done with it, rather than continually being distracted by new story ideas.
Seriously, fun is fun but I’m getting a little old for this.