"Pebble In the Sea"
kielle died on Thursday. I would imagine about half the people following this journal don't know who that is, so if you're interested, I'd just recommend reading my own friendslist page and just keep an eye out for the other half, posting various tributes and condolences.
For my own part, there's not a whole lot for me to say. I never really met Kielle in person, and most of what little online contact I had with her was generally not amicable. I don't say this to rag on her or anything, it's just that as I read my friendslist and saw people swapping stories, I started to think it'd be best if I just stayed quiet, since I had no experiences to share, no old fics of mine that she had inspired.
And then I remembered there was one...
I suppose I could look it up somehow, but I'm willing to settle for saying this would have been sometime in mid-1999/early 2000. Among Kielle's various comic book fanfic projects was "The Common People", sort of a subgenre/fic challenge that had been popular for some time. The premise--or at least my understanding of it--was that you write a story set in the fandom, but without any of the characters from that fandom actually appearing in the story. In other words, a Fantastic Four TCP would be set in a world where the Fantastic Four existed, but the story itself would be about a guy trying to collect insurance for his car after the Thing smashed it in a fight with Dr. Doom. Artifice could be considered an extended Harry Potter TCP, as it revolves around original characters in an alternate version of Harry Potter's world. The only character from the books is Tom Riddle, and his participation thus far has been minimal. Kielle is often credited with "inventing" The Common People, and I'm not sure this is accurate to say, since other fandoms seem to have developed similar versions independently, and Marvel Comics itself has published many stories about ordinary joes trying to live in the shadows of their heroes, most notably Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross' 1994 miniseries Marvels. Nevertheless, I think it's at least fair to say that Kielle crystallized the idea for comics fic, giving it a recognizable name and establishing the ground rules. Because of her, a story on a mailing list with "[TCP]" in the subject header was more likely to be read, and I suppose that's nothing to sneeze at.
Anyway, as fanfiction often goes, the same themes seem would often be repeated over and over again. The Common People hadn't really been that big of a deal to me, since it tended to deal with young mutants discovering their powers in the Marvel Universe, and I wasn't terribly interested in the X-Men at that point. But one day Kielle posted a message that struck me as an interesting challenge. If I recall correctly, she had gotten tired of reading all the TCP stories being written that just repeated the following cliches:
--mutants with the power to talk to animals.
--mutants turning into animals.
--mutants committing suicide (I'm a little fuzzy on this one, but it sounds familiar somehow)
There were others, but you get the idea. I suppose Kielle was just venting frustration with this, but she did close with a general call for some new TCP's with fresher ideas. Interested, I decided to take up the challenge, all part of my quest to prove to the X-Men zombies that I could provide write quality fanfic without getting stuck in the same old ruts.
From her complaints, I immediately realized the underlying problem was that most TCP writers were starting with a mutant protagonist, and having the plot be driven by his/her emergent mutant powers. This isn't a bad way to go, since in the world of the X-Men anyone can be a mutant, so there's lots of stories in comics about the various X-Men exploring the "Mutant Condition", so to speak. Watch the first twenty minutes of the first X-Men movie and you'll see what I mean. It's dramatic, but it had been overused. The alternative, however, was to have a main character without powers, and that would get pretty boring with the superheroes banned from the plot. Ted the Mutant Cubicle Worker was pretty iffy to begin with, and taking out the "Mutant" part didn't seem to help matters. How do you make a plain jane human being interesting?
The answer, for me at least, had been worked out decades earlier, when my favorite author, Isaac Asimov, wrote his novel Pebble in the Sky about a very ordinary man in the 1950's inexplicably being thrown far into the future, where the Earth was persecuted by a mighty Galactic Empire, a society of humans so vast and so old that it had forgotten its own birthworld. The themes in Pebble in the Sky remeinded me a lot of those in X-Men, so I started asking around to see if time travel was permissible under the rules of The Common People. Encouraged to learn that no one had really asked that before, I set to work on the story, which I've included here.
It's been so many years since then that I've forgotten if Kielle ever feedbacked me for this or not. One way or another, the story ended up on the TCP archive on June 26, 2000, so I guess I must have submitted it or granted permission or whatever, and since it's up there, she must not have hated it or anything. To me, that wasn't necessarily the point of the exercise, which is probably why I don't really remember those details. I've seen a lot of people talking about how knowing Kielle or getting involved in OTL or #subcafe or Subreality got them through some rough periods in their lives. Well, for better or worse, I never considered myself to be in that category. I only got into this stuff for the intellectual stimulation, the challenge of it all. And for what it's worth, Kielle gave me one back then. Without her I think it's probably safe to say this story wouldn't have been written, and while that's not very significant in the grand scheme of things, I think tackling this one made me a little bit better writer than I would have been, so if nothing else, I suppose I owe her that.
For my own part, there's not a whole lot for me to say. I never really met Kielle in person, and most of what little online contact I had with her was generally not amicable. I don't say this to rag on her or anything, it's just that as I read my friendslist and saw people swapping stories, I started to think it'd be best if I just stayed quiet, since I had no experiences to share, no old fics of mine that she had inspired.
And then I remembered there was one...
I suppose I could look it up somehow, but I'm willing to settle for saying this would have been sometime in mid-1999/early 2000. Among Kielle's various comic book fanfic projects was "The Common People", sort of a subgenre/fic challenge that had been popular for some time. The premise--or at least my understanding of it--was that you write a story set in the fandom, but without any of the characters from that fandom actually appearing in the story. In other words, a Fantastic Four TCP would be set in a world where the Fantastic Four existed, but the story itself would be about a guy trying to collect insurance for his car after the Thing smashed it in a fight with Dr. Doom. Artifice could be considered an extended Harry Potter TCP, as it revolves around original characters in an alternate version of Harry Potter's world. The only character from the books is Tom Riddle, and his participation thus far has been minimal. Kielle is often credited with "inventing" The Common People, and I'm not sure this is accurate to say, since other fandoms seem to have developed similar versions independently, and Marvel Comics itself has published many stories about ordinary joes trying to live in the shadows of their heroes, most notably Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross' 1994 miniseries Marvels. Nevertheless, I think it's at least fair to say that Kielle crystallized the idea for comics fic, giving it a recognizable name and establishing the ground rules. Because of her, a story on a mailing list with "[TCP]" in the subject header was more likely to be read, and I suppose that's nothing to sneeze at.
Anyway, as fanfiction often goes, the same themes seem would often be repeated over and over again. The Common People hadn't really been that big of a deal to me, since it tended to deal with young mutants discovering their powers in the Marvel Universe, and I wasn't terribly interested in the X-Men at that point. But one day Kielle posted a message that struck me as an interesting challenge. If I recall correctly, she had gotten tired of reading all the TCP stories being written that just repeated the following cliches:
--mutants with the power to talk to animals.
--mutants turning into animals.
--mutants committing suicide (I'm a little fuzzy on this one, but it sounds familiar somehow)
There were others, but you get the idea. I suppose Kielle was just venting frustration with this, but she did close with a general call for some new TCP's with fresher ideas. Interested, I decided to take up the challenge, all part of my quest to prove to the X-Men zombies that I could provide write quality fanfic without getting stuck in the same old ruts.
From her complaints, I immediately realized the underlying problem was that most TCP writers were starting with a mutant protagonist, and having the plot be driven by his/her emergent mutant powers. This isn't a bad way to go, since in the world of the X-Men anyone can be a mutant, so there's lots of stories in comics about the various X-Men exploring the "Mutant Condition", so to speak. Watch the first twenty minutes of the first X-Men movie and you'll see what I mean. It's dramatic, but it had been overused. The alternative, however, was to have a main character without powers, and that would get pretty boring with the superheroes banned from the plot. Ted the Mutant Cubicle Worker was pretty iffy to begin with, and taking out the "Mutant" part didn't seem to help matters. How do you make a plain jane human being interesting?
The answer, for me at least, had been worked out decades earlier, when my favorite author, Isaac Asimov, wrote his novel Pebble in the Sky about a very ordinary man in the 1950's inexplicably being thrown far into the future, where the Earth was persecuted by a mighty Galactic Empire, a society of humans so vast and so old that it had forgotten its own birthworld. The themes in Pebble in the Sky remeinded me a lot of those in X-Men, so I started asking around to see if time travel was permissible under the rules of The Common People. Encouraged to learn that no one had really asked that before, I set to work on the story, which I've included here.
It's been so many years since then that I've forgotten if Kielle ever feedbacked me for this or not. One way or another, the story ended up on the TCP archive on June 26, 2000, so I guess I must have submitted it or granted permission or whatever, and since it's up there, she must not have hated it or anything. To me, that wasn't necessarily the point of the exercise, which is probably why I don't really remember those details. I've seen a lot of people talking about how knowing Kielle or getting involved in OTL or #subcafe or Subreality got them through some rough periods in their lives. Well, for better or worse, I never considered myself to be in that category. I only got into this stuff for the intellectual stimulation, the challenge of it all. And for what it's worth, Kielle gave me one back then. Without her I think it's probably safe to say this story wouldn't have been written, and while that's not very significant in the grand scheme of things, I think tackling this one made me a little bit better writer than I would have been, so if nothing else, I suppose I owe her that.