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yakalskovich) wrote2003-11-02 10:10 pm
yakalskovich) wrote2003-11-02 10:10 pm
Ancient history...
A long, long time ago when Big Ben was a little watch, I was already writing. The oldest things were pencil on paper, hundreds of pages of it, some of it even in Tengwar - as I wrote during boring class, under the desk, but didn't want my stuff legible in case I was caught, which I never was.
I can't remember a time when I didn't churn out all sorts of stories on a regular basis; some I told to my little sister when we were children, and the best ones I wrote down.
But then, in the early nineties, I was exposed to the notion of Fan Fiction.
First, I read about fan fiction in a book about Star Trek, in about 1993, long before the Internet went mainstream, and definitely before the WWW. The book said that there was a kind of fan fiction called K/S, or slash, in short. I did a little triumphant shout, as I'd always seen that in Kirk and Spock in the episodes of the series I had watched, and so I thought a bit on how I'd go about bringing them together while keeping true to the look-and-feel of the series (I was always a stickler for canon). The result was The Demon of Beta 55 - and please remember, I never even read one piece of fan fiction then, I just wrote that, so I committed all the clichés there are, naturally. I still like the cardboardy feel of the planet, though; very authentic, even if I say so myself...
Later on, there was the Internet. With a gay friend, I went fishing for slashy Star Trek stories on usenet and on distributed ftp servers that were recommended by the usenet posts - that was still in 1993. We downloaded them to his computer and I took the floppy home - I wasn't even online then. But that was the very first fan fiction I saw. My friend remarked how terribly unsafe the things were that people did in those rather graphic slash stories, so I ended up writing a K/S slash story that addessed just that issue. One can tell that I'd read a lot of K/S slash by then, and everything else about Star Trek I could get my hands on - I was steeped in fanon and canon alike, and the thing is full of dense context. Not to mention dreadfully moralistic. So be warned before you read Mastery of the Unavoidable - it drips with contrived depth and meaning, and is almost opaque to non-Trekkers.
During that time, I was supposed to write something else: my magisterial thesis, an ordeal we have to go through when studying at a German university if we want to get an MA - a simple examination with 0.5% suicide rate or so is not enough for them. It was nerve-wracking, so instead of writing that, I wrote a Star Trek fanfic novel. This was later in 1994; I still wasn't online, so there was no distraction to be had there. It was either do the legitimate work for my studies, or write fanfic, and that's probably the reason why I managed to go through with the entire novel-length fic. I was by then utterly fed up with the idea of writing Kirk and Spock. As in any busy fandom, all variations had been done, and done again, and then done to death - so I invented my own male/male Vulcan/Human couple, and sent them to Deep Space Nine, which was still new then, and there let them deal with a few memes that I had brooded upon (instead of thinking about that dreary magisterial thesis). The result is called Lieutenants, it has eleven chapters, and it's probably the longest fanfic I shall ever write. It premiers my recurrent character archetype, The Difficult One, who returns in different permutations in almost everything I write. Some writers have such recurring archetypes; Barbara Hambly has The Vigorous Old Man, and Storm Constantine has The Wicked Elusive Father (instances are Thiede, or Metatron, but I could quote more permutations...)
After Lieutenants and the inevitable magisterial thesis, which I did finish as well, I was busy with what was supposed to be my life but later turned out not to have been, namely, normal, dreary paid work. I did post my existing stories around the net when that cropped up and arrived at my own doorstep in the shape of CompuServe, in the autumn of 1995. In the ensuing years, I read Wraeththu, but I wrote only one small piece of Fan Fiction, The Passage of the Chameleon, a slash story about the by now half-forgotten TV series Pretender. That was sometime in 1998.
In the autumn of 2001, when I was mainly through with my years of working like a grown-up mundane, eyes on a prize that wasn't there (whatever was my ambition for?), I discovered that there was, nowadays, an online community that concentrated on Wraeththu, perhaps my favourite book. So, I embarked right away on writing down an idea I'd had when I first read the book: what are they going to do after ten lifetimes, when everything that happened in the books will have become a myth? The result ist Ai-cara 1515, still unfinished, not yet given up; its first part, Spring Rain, is posted on the Forever web site. I have done about half of the second part, Brownout (it's on the Pinkboard.), and I know exactly what I will do in the third part, Festival, and there will be an epilogue as well, but I'm still vaccillating between three different endings for that.
Also on the Pinkboard is my contribution to the Serious Round Robin, aka the Fallsend Saga, but as that isn't officially given up, I'll wait a bit longer until I ask Wiebke if she'd put it up on Forever. My piece is called "Building Immanion", if you'd like to read it - just proceed to the Pinkboard.
Yes, and then there's Drogheda, a one-off the idea to wchich I got a propos my niece Sophia's Powerade bottle. I wrote it in the middle of general family bustle and found out that people around are no excuse for not writing, if you really feel the urge.
Finally, I got a printed contribution in "Writers of the Storm", which you can get here: http://www.angelfire.com/ca6/forever/wots.html
Since then, I have mostly been writing my own stuff - I am trying to write a historical novel, which I will eventually try to sell commercially. I think I might translate the prologue into English (I write that in German; that just happened) and post it here at some later date, just so people see what I am on about. Often, I am not making sense these days, as I am totally obsessed as any writer must be, and as this is no fandom, there are not others to share and understand my enthusiasm. I have beta readers, though, a practice I adopted from fan fiction writing, and that is very supportive.
I do make forays into other slashy fandoms, but as all seems always to be written there, I don't write my own 144th version of the same thing - it simply doesn't call to me. If I can't be original, I'm silent. However, in a quiet corner of a popular fandom, among those select Tolkien fans that deal mostly with his large-scale underlying mythology as laid down in The Silmarillion (and then some posthumously published texts) as opposed to the Lord of the Rings movie fans, I found a challenge to my liking last summer. One of my favourite characters from The Silmarillion, right from when I first read it in 1980, was always Maglor, second among the seven sons of an Elven king, who gets left behind in Middle Earth when all the other Elves leave, because of the unspeakable crimes he committed with his father and brothers (nothing worse that what any human or har does in any war, but totally out of the pale to the high standards of the Elves). Maglor wanders the world of humans forever, being an immortal Elf, and must have been there for the whole of human history, so I put out a challenge at the Silmfics Yahoo! group, and wrote one piece myself where Maglor wanders in 19th century Siberia and meets - Grigori Rasputin, of course, one of the main characters of the historical novel I am trying to write. That story was shortlisted for a "Mithril Award"
, some honour bestowed within the Tolkien fanfic community, but it didn't win anything. The title is A Study in Human Weakness, and I put it up on fanfiction.net. My username there is Sethos; you can find all my collected fanfic writings (except the Wraeththu things) right there: http://www.fanfiction.net/~sethos
This is all for now; I did write more, but not fan fiction. In 1997 my hard disk crashed, and I lost a lot of collected drivel, which was, all in all, a Good Thing, but I do keep writing. As I said, it's natural for me. I turn out plot bunnies as if I was a rabbit doe...
I can't remember a time when I didn't churn out all sorts of stories on a regular basis; some I told to my little sister when we were children, and the best ones I wrote down.
But then, in the early nineties, I was exposed to the notion of Fan Fiction.
First, I read about fan fiction in a book about Star Trek, in about 1993, long before the Internet went mainstream, and definitely before the WWW. The book said that there was a kind of fan fiction called K/S, or slash, in short. I did a little triumphant shout, as I'd always seen that in Kirk and Spock in the episodes of the series I had watched, and so I thought a bit on how I'd go about bringing them together while keeping true to the look-and-feel of the series (I was always a stickler for canon). The result was The Demon of Beta 55 - and please remember, I never even read one piece of fan fiction then, I just wrote that, so I committed all the clichés there are, naturally. I still like the cardboardy feel of the planet, though; very authentic, even if I say so myself...
Later on, there was the Internet. With a gay friend, I went fishing for slashy Star Trek stories on usenet and on distributed ftp servers that were recommended by the usenet posts - that was still in 1993. We downloaded them to his computer and I took the floppy home - I wasn't even online then. But that was the very first fan fiction I saw. My friend remarked how terribly unsafe the things were that people did in those rather graphic slash stories, so I ended up writing a K/S slash story that addessed just that issue. One can tell that I'd read a lot of K/S slash by then, and everything else about Star Trek I could get my hands on - I was steeped in fanon and canon alike, and the thing is full of dense context. Not to mention dreadfully moralistic. So be warned before you read Mastery of the Unavoidable - it drips with contrived depth and meaning, and is almost opaque to non-Trekkers.
During that time, I was supposed to write something else: my magisterial thesis, an ordeal we have to go through when studying at a German university if we want to get an MA - a simple examination with 0.5% suicide rate or so is not enough for them. It was nerve-wracking, so instead of writing that, I wrote a Star Trek fanfic novel. This was later in 1994; I still wasn't online, so there was no distraction to be had there. It was either do the legitimate work for my studies, or write fanfic, and that's probably the reason why I managed to go through with the entire novel-length fic. I was by then utterly fed up with the idea of writing Kirk and Spock. As in any busy fandom, all variations had been done, and done again, and then done to death - so I invented my own male/male Vulcan/Human couple, and sent them to Deep Space Nine, which was still new then, and there let them deal with a few memes that I had brooded upon (instead of thinking about that dreary magisterial thesis). The result is called Lieutenants, it has eleven chapters, and it's probably the longest fanfic I shall ever write. It premiers my recurrent character archetype, The Difficult One, who returns in different permutations in almost everything I write. Some writers have such recurring archetypes; Barbara Hambly has The Vigorous Old Man, and Storm Constantine has The Wicked Elusive Father (instances are Thiede, or Metatron, but I could quote more permutations...)
After Lieutenants and the inevitable magisterial thesis, which I did finish as well, I was busy with what was supposed to be my life but later turned out not to have been, namely, normal, dreary paid work. I did post my existing stories around the net when that cropped up and arrived at my own doorstep in the shape of CompuServe, in the autumn of 1995. In the ensuing years, I read Wraeththu, but I wrote only one small piece of Fan Fiction, The Passage of the Chameleon, a slash story about the by now half-forgotten TV series Pretender. That was sometime in 1998.
In the autumn of 2001, when I was mainly through with my years of working like a grown-up mundane, eyes on a prize that wasn't there (whatever was my ambition for?), I discovered that there was, nowadays, an online community that concentrated on Wraeththu, perhaps my favourite book. So, I embarked right away on writing down an idea I'd had when I first read the book: what are they going to do after ten lifetimes, when everything that happened in the books will have become a myth? The result ist Ai-cara 1515, still unfinished, not yet given up; its first part, Spring Rain, is posted on the Forever web site. I have done about half of the second part, Brownout (it's on the Pinkboard.), and I know exactly what I will do in the third part, Festival, and there will be an epilogue as well, but I'm still vaccillating between three different endings for that.
Also on the Pinkboard is my contribution to the Serious Round Robin, aka the Fallsend Saga, but as that isn't officially given up, I'll wait a bit longer until I ask Wiebke if she'd put it up on Forever. My piece is called "Building Immanion", if you'd like to read it - just proceed to the Pinkboard.
Yes, and then there's Drogheda, a one-off the idea to wchich I got a propos my niece Sophia's Powerade bottle. I wrote it in the middle of general family bustle and found out that people around are no excuse for not writing, if you really feel the urge.
Finally, I got a printed contribution in "Writers of the Storm", which you can get here: http://www.angelfire.com/ca6/forever/wots.html
Since then, I have mostly been writing my own stuff - I am trying to write a historical novel, which I will eventually try to sell commercially. I think I might translate the prologue into English (I write that in German; that just happened) and post it here at some later date, just so people see what I am on about. Often, I am not making sense these days, as I am totally obsessed as any writer must be, and as this is no fandom, there are not others to share and understand my enthusiasm. I have beta readers, though, a practice I adopted from fan fiction writing, and that is very supportive.
I do make forays into other slashy fandoms, but as all seems always to be written there, I don't write my own 144th version of the same thing - it simply doesn't call to me. If I can't be original, I'm silent. However, in a quiet corner of a popular fandom, among those select Tolkien fans that deal mostly with his large-scale underlying mythology as laid down in The Silmarillion (and then some posthumously published texts) as opposed to the Lord of the Rings movie fans, I found a challenge to my liking last summer. One of my favourite characters from The Silmarillion, right from when I first read it in 1980, was always Maglor, second among the seven sons of an Elven king, who gets left behind in Middle Earth when all the other Elves leave, because of the unspeakable crimes he committed with his father and brothers (nothing worse that what any human or har does in any war, but totally out of the pale to the high standards of the Elves). Maglor wanders the world of humans forever, being an immortal Elf, and must have been there for the whole of human history, so I put out a challenge at the Silmfics Yahoo! group, and wrote one piece myself where Maglor wanders in 19th century Siberia and meets - Grigori Rasputin, of course, one of the main characters of the historical novel I am trying to write. That story was shortlisted for a "Mithril Award"
, some honour bestowed within the Tolkien fanfic community, but it didn't win anything. The title is A Study in Human Weakness, and I put it up on fanfiction.net. My username there is Sethos; you can find all my collected fanfic writings (except the Wraeththu things) right there: http://www.fanfiction.net/~sethos
This is all for now; I did write more, but not fan fiction. In 1997 my hard disk crashed, and I lost a lot of collected drivel, which was, all in all, a Good Thing, but I do keep writing. As I said, it's natural for me. I turn out plot bunnies as if I was a rabbit doe...
no subject
Your fic was the final prod to get me to write down my own Maglor-fic idea. It's available on my lj, and is a gift for you and