30 Day Fanfiction Meme, Part 1
In 2014 on this blog, Fridays are for fan fiction.
To kick this off, I’m going to start out by doing the 30 Day Fanfiction meme that’s available at Verka’s site. Since this is a daily meme and Fridays only happen weekly, later posts will include multiple questions. This first post, though, includes only the first question simply because it’s a multi-part question.
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?
I think I’ve been writing fan fiction ever since I was old enough to understand fiction. It started out with simply telling stories (to myself, or to my family) about “what happened next” whenever a story - be it a book, a television episode, or something else - came to its end.
The first actual fanfic I wrote was probably for Star Trek: The Original Series and has been lost to the sands of time. In junior high school, shortly after TNG came out, I plotted out a very Mary Sue-ish series on paper that, thankfully, never gotten written. I also periodically rewrote episodes of both TOS and TNG to suit my particular teenager-ish preferences.
The first story that I finished and published was the original version of my Star Trek: Voyager novella Limits in 1998/1999, when I was in my early twenties. Although I’ve since completely rewritten it, it’s still my favorite piece. It has a bit more of me in it than a lot of my work: Captain Janeway’s back problems mirror my own and I’ve been interested in the earth sciences for most of my life. I’ve also been a Janeway/Chakotay fan ever since I first saw a certain scene in the episode “Scorpion” (J/C’ers will know which one I’m talking about), and part of my underlying purpose was in fact to get the two of those together.
I’m reasonably certain that my teenage writing activities were influenced by the presence of Trek tie-in novels; at the time I started reading them they were still something of a unique phenomenon. I’d originally encountered Trek as a book series via the Blish readers, and the idea that writers could write stories about other writers’ work was something of an inspiration. The various plot holes in Voyager annoyed me enough to want to start actually contributing, and by that point I was aware that you didn’t have to have a publishing contract to get your stories out there.
I nearly exclusively wrote Voyager (primarily J/C) through the end of the series in 2001, although I dabbled a little in other fandoms after discovering their existence over at The Pit of Voles FanFiction.net. After the series ended, I pretty much stopped writing, and I figured it was likely to end up being a hobby I’d had for a while but from which I later moved on.
I was wrong, but that’s another story.
It was through Voyager fan fiction that I discovered and connected with the wider world of online fandom. The welcoming nature of the other fans, and their encouragement of my writing, is what kept me writing for Voyager, and it was through that writing that I met people I still consider friends today. The two tend to feed off of each other, and I’m happy that I stumbled into fandom since it has become a significant positive force in my life.
I haven’t written any new Voyager fic in quite a while, mostly because I think I’ve said all I want to say in that particular universe (and, admittedly, because the parts of the series finale broke my heart). But there are two stories that I may still decide to finish up, and I still occasionally read new stories when they come out. It’ll always be my official first fandom, though, as well as the source of my fandom handle. And I’ll always have an indulgent, nostalgic smile on my face whenever I’m asked about that particular iteration of the Trek universe.
Original Post: http://sonria.org/blog/2014/30-day-fanfiction-meme-part-1/. You can comment here or there.