and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy
12/17: heatherlayne_n asked about First fanfic you wrote and/or how you got into fanfic writing.
I had always made up stories about the characters I loved in my head, and sometimes as a kid would convince friends to play them out with me (they were mostly of the "going up in space and fighting aliens" or "being elves in the magical woods" variety - why yes, I did see Star Wars and read LotR at a fairly formative age. *g*) and later I wrote tragically awful "original" stories that were mostly ripoffs of LotR and which I never finished, and which absolutely featured Mary Sues (I was mostly fond writing myself into a lady Han Solo type as a kid).
Many, many years later (November 1997, to be exact), I discovered internet fandom (alt.tv.homicide, to be exact), but for those first couple of years, I mainly participated in discussion newsgroups - ath, alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer and alt.tv.angel - as a frequent poster (I lurked occasionally on alt.tv.er) and occasionally tried reading fanfic but I ran into some really terrible (to me) stuff, which put me off reading it for a long time (I still don't much care for h/c, but if Mulder-torture hadn't been the first thing I found, I might have started writing fic a little earlier? I don't know).
In June of 2000, with the encouragement of various denizens of atbvs, I started writing some gen Angel fic, but I actually never finished it. (I did eventually post it to LJ during a wip amnesty period.)
And then in July 2000, I saw X-Men (or X1 or however we're referring to it) and after seeing it two or three times in that weekend (I was in Denver for a conference, so I went at least once by myself and once with L. there, and then possibly twice more once I was back in NYC), I jumped into chat and was like, GIVE ME ALL YOUR LOGAN/ROGUE LINKS. And not surprisingly,
katemonkey knew where to find the good stuff. "Safety in Numbers" by uhmidont (?I think?) was one of the first stories I read (if not THE first) and it totally blew my mind. Also osito_panda had a wip going and I devoured that, and I signed up for the X-Men movieverse fanfic mailing list and the Wolverine and Rogue fanfic mailing list, and I just read EVERYTHING. And then I thought about how I would tell a story about Logan's return and then I started writing, by hand, whenever I had a free moment. And I didn't have my own computer at home then - I traveled with a work laptop and used my dad's PC for everything else, so most of my early writing was by hand, which then had to be typed up and I made my mom and L. read it over before I got the nerve to ask for betas, and the internets blessed me with Jen and Meg and Pete (and later, Melissa) and Dot, and my god, that first story went through 8 drafts (that is not an exaggeration - I made them read it EIGHT TIMES) before I finally posted it to the mailing list on September 4, 2000.
While that mailing list is gone (a long story for another time) and my website (opened in March of 2001) is also gone now, and this is pre-LJ, the story is still available at the WRFA: Enough for Now (I haven't reread it in years, so I don't know how it holds up). People were very kind to me and I made the rookie mistake of letting the "More please" comments convince me to write a sequel and then another sequel and then it turned into a series of, like, seven or eight stories. *hands* I don't really do that much anymore.
But I also had other ideas! I was miserable at work and unwell physically and mentally, which meant I spent A LOT of time writing when I was supposed to be doing other things, so I got a lot of fic written those first couple of years (especially after I quit my job and was unemployed for a few months in 2001). And I made some of the best friends I've got in that fandom, so even though there was a lot of unpleasantness that made me swear I was 1. never going to read an X-Men comic¶ (a vow only broken earlier this year) and 2. never write in XMM again (a vow that was broken after XMFC came out, and then when I wrote Logan and Bucky as cranky young-old besties, which I still wish was more of a thing in the comics¶¶), I'm still occasionally nostalgic for how MUCH I wrote then, because I didn't know what I was doing, so I didn't think myself out of writing things. I just started writing and trusted that eventually, I'd get to the end. *hands* I wrote over 100 stories in that fandom, and here I am, thirteen years later, back in the Marvel movieverse.
¶ This is the reason I try never to get shirty with anyone in the MCU fandom who hasn't read any comics, because IT'S ITS OWN UNIVERSE. YOU DON'T NEED TO READ THE COMICS TO READ/WRITE FIC IN THE MCU. IT'S NOT THE SAME, OKAY. It's nice for background and gives you a lot more stuff to play with, but it's not necessary and anyone who tells you it is can fuck right off (and if they give you trouble, you can send 'em to me, and I'll tell 'em). It was that attitude back in my XMM days that led to me making that vow, and I can't believe some of the same shit is still going on today. (a lot less, it must be said. A LOT LESS. but I still see it occasionally and I have even less patience for it now than I did then.) You might enjoy reading superhero comics if you try it (I did! but I came to it many years after that, and via DC), but it is in NO WAY MANDATORY and fuck anyone who tells you it is.
¶¶ Remember when Bucky had friends and did lots of useful things instead of drowning in manpain? Sigh.
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/623954.html.
people have commented there.
I had always made up stories about the characters I loved in my head, and sometimes as a kid would convince friends to play them out with me (they were mostly of the "going up in space and fighting aliens" or "being elves in the magical woods" variety - why yes, I did see Star Wars and read LotR at a fairly formative age. *g*) and later I wrote tragically awful "original" stories that were mostly ripoffs of LotR and which I never finished, and which absolutely featured Mary Sues (I was mostly fond writing myself into a lady Han Solo type as a kid).
Many, many years later (November 1997, to be exact), I discovered internet fandom (alt.tv.homicide, to be exact), but for those first couple of years, I mainly participated in discussion newsgroups - ath, alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer and alt.tv.angel - as a frequent poster (I lurked occasionally on alt.tv.er) and occasionally tried reading fanfic but I ran into some really terrible (to me) stuff, which put me off reading it for a long time (I still don't much care for h/c, but if Mulder-torture hadn't been the first thing I found, I might have started writing fic a little earlier? I don't know).
In June of 2000, with the encouragement of various denizens of atbvs, I started writing some gen Angel fic, but I actually never finished it. (I did eventually post it to LJ during a wip amnesty period.)
And then in July 2000, I saw X-Men (or X1 or however we're referring to it) and after seeing it two or three times in that weekend (I was in Denver for a conference, so I went at least once by myself and once with L. there, and then possibly twice more once I was back in NYC), I jumped into chat and was like, GIVE ME ALL YOUR LOGAN/ROGUE LINKS. And not surprisingly,
katemonkey knew where to find the good stuff. "Safety in Numbers" by uhmidont (?I think?) was one of the first stories I read (if not THE first) and it totally blew my mind. Also osito_panda had a wip going and I devoured that, and I signed up for the X-Men movieverse fanfic mailing list and the Wolverine and Rogue fanfic mailing list, and I just read EVERYTHING. And then I thought about how I would tell a story about Logan's return and then I started writing, by hand, whenever I had a free moment. And I didn't have my own computer at home then - I traveled with a work laptop and used my dad's PC for everything else, so most of my early writing was by hand, which then had to be typed up and I made my mom and L. read it over before I got the nerve to ask for betas, and the internets blessed me with Jen and Meg and Pete (and later, Melissa) and Dot, and my god, that first story went through 8 drafts (that is not an exaggeration - I made them read it EIGHT TIMES) before I finally posted it to the mailing list on September 4, 2000.
While that mailing list is gone (a long story for another time) and my website (opened in March of 2001) is also gone now, and this is pre-LJ, the story is still available at the WRFA: Enough for Now (I haven't reread it in years, so I don't know how it holds up). People were very kind to me and I made the rookie mistake of letting the "More please" comments convince me to write a sequel and then another sequel and then it turned into a series of, like, seven or eight stories. *hands* I don't really do that much anymore.
But I also had other ideas! I was miserable at work and unwell physically and mentally, which meant I spent A LOT of time writing when I was supposed to be doing other things, so I got a lot of fic written those first couple of years (especially after I quit my job and was unemployed for a few months in 2001). And I made some of the best friends I've got in that fandom, so even though there was a lot of unpleasantness that made me swear I was 1. never going to read an X-Men comic¶ (a vow only broken earlier this year) and 2. never write in XMM again (a vow that was broken after XMFC came out, and then when I wrote Logan and Bucky as cranky young-old besties, which I still wish was more of a thing in the comics¶¶), I'm still occasionally nostalgic for how MUCH I wrote then, because I didn't know what I was doing, so I didn't think myself out of writing things. I just started writing and trusted that eventually, I'd get to the end. *hands* I wrote over 100 stories in that fandom, and here I am, thirteen years later, back in the Marvel movieverse.
¶ This is the reason I try never to get shirty with anyone in the MCU fandom who hasn't read any comics, because IT'S ITS OWN UNIVERSE. YOU DON'T NEED TO READ THE COMICS TO READ/WRITE FIC IN THE MCU. IT'S NOT THE SAME, OKAY. It's nice for background and gives you a lot more stuff to play with, but it's not necessary and anyone who tells you it is can fuck right off (and if they give you trouble, you can send 'em to me, and I'll tell 'em). It was that attitude back in my XMM days that led to me making that vow, and I can't believe some of the same shit is still going on today. (a lot less, it must be said. A LOT LESS. but I still see it occasionally and I have even less patience for it now than I did then.) You might enjoy reading superhero comics if you try it (I did! but I came to it many years after that, and via DC), but it is in NO WAY MANDATORY and fuck anyone who tells you it is.
¶¶ Remember when Bucky had friends and did lots of useful things instead of drowning in manpain? Sigh.
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/623954.html.
people have commented there.