Fandom Questions Meme (21)

[thisbluespirit]

21. What was the first fanfic you ever wrote?

A good question, because I'm not entirely sure. I think it probably must be the long Six, Peri and Mary Sue fic, but I can't swear to it that I didn't actually post something else first. It is still up on the net, via the Internet Archive and alt.drwho.creative, because I started in newsgroup days and alt.drwho.creative stuff dies only slowly and you can't take it down, but it's pretty bad and under my real name, so I'm not providing a link.


I poked alt.drwho.creative to check, and it's a bit hard to be certain - it seems a bit of an odd way to start fic-writing - but it looks as if that might not have been the first thing:

I had this cunning idea that I could begin a story and other people could continue it and so on. (A round robin, but I'd never heard of a round robin until after I posted it.) The thing is, newsnet groups weren't like the modern internet and messages appeared at different times to different people, and sometimes not at all to other people, so the continuation got rather sprawling, but it was entertaining as it imploded down different trouser legs of a newsnet octopus, anyway.

After that, Becky Dowgiert started the first moderated Round Robin of what became the Internet Adventures, so sometimes as a result, I like to claim that I started the whole thing. (It's important to note that nobody else ever agreed with my claim, and these days barely anybody even remembers the Internet Adventures, but, hey, they were good days. Most of the time.)

Comments

[arcanetrivia]

different trouser legs of a newsnet octopus

XD

I'd take Usenet over Facebook any day.

[thisbluespirit]

I have to say, that fun as they were, and much as I avoid Facebook, I don't think I'd go back - I prefer not to miss vital chunks of the conversation! I am also a fan of editing and italics, and images being acceptable.

[jhall1]

I agree. Facebook seems to be set up for social networking, and you can't really have a proper discussion there. Though Dreamwidth and Livejournal are pretty good for that.

I've been on the Net since 1994, and it's true that in the early days there could be problems with newsgroup messages not propagating in a timely fashion. But that was pretty much sorted by the late 1990s as Net connectivity improved, and that was several years before Web forums came to dominate.

I still follow a few newsgroups that remain active. It's convenient to be able to download messages for all the groups that I'm interested in in one go, whereas I have to visit individually each Web forum that I follow.

[liadt]

The stuff you want preserved on the net tends to be the pages that disappear! All my fics are on AO3: there are some benefits to being a late starter.

[thisbluespirit]

So true!

Until the future when AO3 inevitably goes the way of all other virtual things, I suppose! ;-)

[liadt]

I often think of AO3 going down too - the joy of technology!

[scripsi]

Oh, now when I think of it, my first fanfic was actually a round robin! But we never called it fanfic. We write Harriet vane's detective novel Death Twixt Wind and Water which she writes in Sayer's Gaudy Night. I had totally forgotten that- it must have been in 2000, or so. And I checked- it's still online!

[thisbluespirit]

Oh, that sounds like a really fascinating project! Round robins are incredibly fun to do but also very frustrating. :-)

[scripsi]

It was great fun! I don't know if I dare re-read my chapter, though. It was the first time I wrote prose in English! And someone also made an amazing cover in a 30's style, but that one doesn't seem to be online anymore.

[swordznsorcery]

Are you counting fanfic just as online stuff, or did you not write anything fannish in the pre-internet days? Writing seems so much a part of you, it seems a little odd that you might not have been writing long before.

[thisbluespirit]

I did write a couple of fannish things in notebooks, but I was mostly writing terrible fantasy epics in those days!

So, yes, I was writing, one way or another, for nearly as long as I can remember, but not fannish stuff much until the internet came along. (I used to tell my sister stories at night when we were very small; that's the first writing-y thing I recall.)

[swordznsorcery]

Cool! Did you keep any of them? Not that I would be asking you to put them online, but sometimes such things can be interesting to look back on. Or mortifying. Or possibly both!

[thisbluespirit]

I think one or two were written in my teenage diary when I got bored of my own life, but that's another thing that's too embarrassing to look at as a general rule! So, yes, and no. Mind, I think the other things never got as far as paper, to be honest.

Oh, wait, my epic teen fantasies? Oh, yes. Some of them, and some of the later stuff too. Also very embarrassing, but I typed them up on my electric typewriter. They used to get very interesting when I ran out of correcting tape.

[swordznsorcery]

I meant all of it really. It's great that you have some record, possibly even of the stories you used to tell your sister (although yes, teenage diaries. Ouch!) It can be useful to see how you've developed as a writer.

[thisbluespirit]

The one really fun bit about the diaries is that my sister (well, actually at one point, both of them) kept them at the same time and we did used to back a while have times where we compared entries, and they were occasionally hilarious because we wrote about completely different things, as if we didn't live in the same house.

But nobody else gets to see them! lol.