"Cimorene hated it."
readbystarlight prompted me Hmmm...going back to your first fandom roots?, or, at any rate, I chose to interpret that as a prompt, and, oh am I going back to my roots. The Enchanted Forest Chronicles were my Larry Stylinson. They were my Twilight; Patricia C. Wrede had invented wizards and I was going to be a witch when I grew up. Okay, so, I knew that I wasn't going to be a witch when I grew up and I also had a sensible occupation picked out, but there was a time that I lived in these books and it was this amazingly intense experience, that I thankfully mostly kept to myself because I was already a weird kid.
I remember writing a story in this pink spiral bound notebook. I remember my letters on those pages and it was this thing heavily inspired by those books, especially the descriptions of the Caves of Fire and Night and her approach to fairy tales; I think a goblin ate a princess after, like, three pages of landscape description.
That whole phase is my earliest memory of being a fan and expressing that creatively. I had shipped things earlier, but I had never been that engaged with a canon before, and I'm not sure that I have been since, either. I think I've lost that kind of rawness that lets you tumble so hard for something like that. I'm okay with that.
I still remember that tumble, though, I remember reading that first page of my library book, and by the time I got to the end of that second paragraph I was gone. My fannish roots are in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Every once in a while I'll pick up one of the books - usually Dealing with Dragons - and read it; it's like coming home.
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