Snowflake challenge no. 2: Fannish origin story

[kathleen_dailey]

In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story.



I may have been born moderately proto-fannish. I can dimly remember telling and enacting Little Women stories and role-playing with my tiny pals, and the making of a big collage-type display of vampires, monsters, and ghosts (pics cut out from horror-movie fan mags). Of course I watched the original series of Star Trek with my mom, and like a zillion other fans I had a bit of a thing for Spock. But the onset of genuine, grown-up fannishness came sometime in the 1980s, when I was working on-site for a freelance client.

The editing job was highly paid and deadly boring, and I spent my lunch hours browsing Lichtman's looking for something, anything, worth reading. One day I randomly picked out a paperback titled The Best of Trek, more because of its attractively lurid spacey cover than anything else. But as I browsed through the essays, I began to feel as if a tectonic plate was shifting beneath my feet. Here were people writing, in a fair amount of depth, about the actual personality traits and backstories of the Star Trek characters! Especially Spock! It had simply never occurred to me that there might be all this hidden lore and complexity in the Trek universe. I grabbed that book and all the others that were available in the series, and that was pretty much that. I hadn't yet heard of "hyperfixation," but my state of mind clearly met the clinical definition.

It was easy to find a door into fandom in those days. Bakka Books in Toronto was an important SF literary outlet then, and every convention in the world, it seemed, displayed promotional flyers there. When I saw that Toronto Trek (later named Polaris) was coming up, I made plans to go all by myself. After three days of panels, filking, author readings, guest appearances, dealers' rooms, room parties, art shows, costume competitions, and all the other stuff that went along with the con experience, I was well and truly hooked--not just on the Trek universe, but also and eventually on Xena, X-Files, Babylon 5, and BTVS.

Over the years that I went to Trek and SF conventions, I participated in panels, helped to organize events, and volunteered in green rooms. I met so many wonderful fans, along with writers and actors, in those pre-internet days. And when Usenet, BBSs, and mailing lists came along, the circles expanded. But it wasn't until I met Claire Gabriel that I began to think I might also have a couple of stories to tell.

For about fifteen years, I was all about reading, writing, talking, and breathing fandom and fanfic. I hung out on mostly on private mailing lists with fic writers, and we were each others' beta readers, cheerleaders, teachers, and friends. But as everyone knows, the lists and Usenet gradually gave way to other platforms, and fandom started to fragment into the diverse and scattered universe that it is today.

Life and work happened, and I didn't really follow my friends to the new platforms. (I was already in first stages of gafiation, having never recovered from the damage that Voyager and its showrunners did to my love of Trek.) Although I had an early LJ account and later an early Dreamwidth account, I never did much with them (except read other people's postings). I was also an early user of AO3, but I wasn't writing anything new, and life's complications made me delay (for years) moving my stories from my personal website to the archive.

I finally made contact with Open Doors at OTW a couple of years ago, and they very kindly assisted me in getting the stories reformatted and posted on AO3. I brought my DW account back to life, and I'm so glad that I did. Even though I'm not writing, I'm happy to be able to read and participate in fannish discourse.

TLDR: My true fannish origin story (that is, the transition from "enthusiastically interested" to "100 percent hyperfixated") started with Claire Gabriel. If I hadn't been inspired by her writing to create that very first story of my own, I would never have written and published (and later posted) my fanfic, and I never would have formed the friendships that sustained me for so many years.

Comments

[gingicat]

I'm so glad you came back and posted your fic. I shall have to go look for it.

Did you ever go to FilkOntario?

I think gafiation is one of those things that can always be recovered from. I'm trying to get myself to go back to conventions, even though all of the friends I met there will also be fifty-ish and older.

[kathleen_dailey]

Thank you! The fic is here.

Yes, once upon a time I was fairly heavily involved with the filk scene (under another name) and attended many FilkONtarios. Maybe we saw each other there. :)

It's been years since I've been to an in-person con, so I'll be very interested in hearing your thoughts if you do decide to attend a convention.

[musyc]

I grabbed that book and all the others that were available in the series, and that was pretty much that.

That's wonderful!

[kathleen_dailey]

It was as if the scales had fallen from my eyes. :)

I really wish I'd held on to all those old Best of Trek books, because it might be fun to reread them in the light of contemporary fannish culture. Sadly, they gradually disappeared over moves and purges through the years.