writing to quiet down a busy brain
The first two months of my freshman year in college were comparatively easy. I only had to adjust to living 200 miles away from everyone I'd known for almost 18 years and learn to handle new, somewhat more difficult classes.
Then came the tooth incident - I had to go to the dentist for a cavity, or some other such thing, and my co-pay was $40. Mom and Dad gave me some cash each month and a credit card for emergencies, but I was down on cash and this was 1990, when a lot of medical offices still dealt only in cash or checks - no cards. So, I got a job washing dishes in the campus cafeteria, because I didn't want to be stuck in that position ever again.
The following year, I picked up two part-time jobs on campus in addition to the dish-washing; as a full-time student working more-than-full-time hours each week, I only had about four hours to sleep on weeknights, and limited free time on the weekends. Between writing papers, making sandwiches, doing dishes, and grading tests, the way I relaxed was watching Star Trek and writing fiction - or trying to. I was good at scenes and dialogue, but finishing a longer story always proved to be rough.
Luckily, I found writing for the sake of making up stories relaxing, which eventually extended into fanfiction. I liked reading it; it made sense that I wanted to try producing it. I started by emulating the stories I liked the best - mostly humor and parody - then started writing stories that I wanted to read and couldn't find. As this was before the internet, I was also limited by access to only relatively few stories about Trek that were in 'zines I or my local fandom friends had written or purchased. (Well, and the show itself. Which I guess was okay, too.)
Rose and I still got together to watch reruns when we could, as well as other shows, and we hung out when we could both spare time to get together in daylight hours. While watching TNG, we discussed story ideas - in later years, we would also do this while driving somewhere on a couple of different vacations, to pass the time. (We also got stuck in Nashville traffic on one of these trips and terrorized fellow motorists by rolling down our windows and caterwauling loudly to "Ol' Yellow Eyes Is Back" by Brent Spiner on my car tape deck - but that's a story for another time.)
I was still writing original stories - or trying to - in addition to the fanfic. So was Rose. It was just part of what we did. She was also part of a group of friends who got together to discuss old episodes of TOS and write stories about Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, et. al. (And yeah - some of those were the sexy kind, just like some of mine were. In between the plot, Data and Tasha got up to all kinds of AWOOGAH in my stories, to quote Homer Simpson.)
Rose graduated two years before I did, but we kept in touch through letters and occasional phone calls when one of us could afford it - landlines were not cheap, but luckily stamps still kind of were. At one point we had a story going through mail, in which each of us would type a couple of pages of a "chapter" and send it to the other, continuing it. It was the original crackfic.
I finally got to go to my first Star Trek convention a couple of years after I started watching the show, and there, I found other fans, writers, fan artists, 'zines ... and opinions about fanfiction.
Then came the tooth incident - I had to go to the dentist for a cavity, or some other such thing, and my co-pay was $40. Mom and Dad gave me some cash each month and a credit card for emergencies, but I was down on cash and this was 1990, when a lot of medical offices still dealt only in cash or checks - no cards. So, I got a job washing dishes in the campus cafeteria, because I didn't want to be stuck in that position ever again.
The following year, I picked up two part-time jobs on campus in addition to the dish-washing; as a full-time student working more-than-full-time hours each week, I only had about four hours to sleep on weeknights, and limited free time on the weekends. Between writing papers, making sandwiches, doing dishes, and grading tests, the way I relaxed was watching Star Trek and writing fiction - or trying to. I was good at scenes and dialogue, but finishing a longer story always proved to be rough.
Luckily, I found writing for the sake of making up stories relaxing, which eventually extended into fanfiction. I liked reading it; it made sense that I wanted to try producing it. I started by emulating the stories I liked the best - mostly humor and parody - then started writing stories that I wanted to read and couldn't find. As this was before the internet, I was also limited by access to only relatively few stories about Trek that were in 'zines I or my local fandom friends had written or purchased. (Well, and the show itself. Which I guess was okay, too.)
Rose and I still got together to watch reruns when we could, as well as other shows, and we hung out when we could both spare time to get together in daylight hours. While watching TNG, we discussed story ideas - in later years, we would also do this while driving somewhere on a couple of different vacations, to pass the time. (We also got stuck in Nashville traffic on one of these trips and terrorized fellow motorists by rolling down our windows and caterwauling loudly to "Ol' Yellow Eyes Is Back" by Brent Spiner on my car tape deck - but that's a story for another time.)
I was still writing original stories - or trying to - in addition to the fanfic. So was Rose. It was just part of what we did. She was also part of a group of friends who got together to discuss old episodes of TOS and write stories about Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, et. al. (And yeah - some of those were the sexy kind, just like some of mine were. In between the plot, Data and Tasha got up to all kinds of AWOOGAH in my stories, to quote Homer Simpson.)
Rose graduated two years before I did, but we kept in touch through letters and occasional phone calls when one of us could afford it - landlines were not cheap, but luckily stamps still kind of were. At one point we had a story going through mail, in which each of us would type a couple of pages of a "chapter" and send it to the other, continuing it. It was the original crackfic.
I finally got to go to my first Star Trek convention a couple of years after I started watching the show, and there, I found other fans, writers, fan artists, 'zines ... and opinions about fanfiction.