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

[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.