Boy, this entry is goddamn long.
Aug. 13th, 2006 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elsajeniWARNING: dorky and slightly embarrassing content follows.
Anyone (of those of you who write or have written fanfic, anyway) remember what the first fanfic you ever wrote was?![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
amanuensis1 seems to have started this, and now I'm intrigued. I remember mine -- or, rather, I remember the first two pieces of fanfic I wrote, and I'm honestly not sure which came first.
One of them -- actually, the more I think about it, the more it becomes obvious to me that this was the first one, because I remember writing it in WordPerfect and the other one in Word, and also because I thought of it as incredibly long at the time I wrote it, but the other one was much, much longer. Anyway: I read The Lord of the Rings when I was nine, is possibly the first thing you ought to know about this. I was young and easily led; therefore this may not have been my fault.
When I finished The Lord of the Rings, I found the ending to be fundamentally unsatisfying*. I wanted to know, but then what happened? The obvious solution quickly presented itself. So I wrote some fanfic.
It primarily involved Sam Gamgee's eldest daughter, Elanor, and Gandalf. (Yes, Gandalf sailed into the West at the same time as Frodo, at which time Elanor was an infant. No, I did not in any way explain in the story what the hell he was doing back in Middle-Earth.) Amazingly, I still remember in great detail the plot of this fic, which I felt at the time was unbelievably long (five or six printed pages, as I recall, and definitely the longest thing I had written at that time). The main idea was that, because of something in some way related to Sam's travels, Elanor had magical powers**. These powers began to manifest when she was an adolescent, and because she was, frankly, freaking people out, her parents packed her off to go on some sort of Quest Of Understanding with Gandalf. So she went on a Quest Of Understanding, and ended up understanding and learning to control her powers, and went home. Oh, and she saw the elanor flowers that she was named after for the first time, I remember writing that bit as well.
Yes, in five pages. What?
I was ten and a half when the Special Edition versions were released; I had never previously seen or even heard of Star Wars*** and found it to be, frankly, the greatest thing in the entire goddamn world. Nothing had ever reached into the deepest part of my overactive pre-adolescent imagination and snapped it to attention and stood the hairs on the back of my neck on end the way Star Wars did. Nothing has done so since. Nothing has even come close. I had read Lord of the Rings the year before, and boy, had it ever lit my imagination on fire, but it was nothing compared to the way I felt after seeing Star Wars.
I am offering this as, in a certain kind of way, an excuse.
It was about three seconds before I was collaborating with my best friend on what turned out to be an abso-fucking-lutely epic fanfic. The main character of this fanfic, at least from my perspective (the friend had other intentions, which is largely why we never finished the thing), was of course Luke Skywalker's long-lost sister.
... No, his other long-lost sister.
Yes, she looked suspiciously like me.
Yes, she was eleven.
Yes, she had a lightsaber.
Yes, the lightsaber in question had a blade that was more than one color AT THE SAME TIME.
... Look, let's not talk about this anymore.
I wish I could find brief excerpts of these fanfics for you. Unfortunately, since they were written on the computer, I no longer have hard copies of them; they were saved to the hard drives of computers that are now, of course, both obsolete and broken, and although I did back up at least one of them to disk, the disk in question is long since defunct (there was an incident with the Blue Screen of Death some years ago).
* DON'T FORGET TO PUT THE FOOTNOTE HERE IN A MINUTE.
** This was not quite as crackheaded an idea as it sounds. There is a strong suggestion in the end of Return of the King that parts of the Shire, and children born in the Shire after the return of the Fellowship, are not quite the same as they were beforehand, and that this is in some way connected to the soil and seeds given to Sam by Galadriel; describing this effect as fey or elf-touched would not be entirely off target.
*** This is not strictly true; I do remember, as a small child, seeing about two minutes of what I later realized must have been Return of the Jedi on TV. I can't prove that this happened, but at least according to my memory, it was the tail end of the speederbike chase through the forest on Endor, and the first appearance of an Ewok.
Anyone (of those of you who write or have written fanfic, anyway) remember what the first fanfic you ever wrote was?
amanuensis1 seems to have started this, and now I'm intrigued. I remember mine -- or, rather, I remember the first two pieces of fanfic I wrote, and I'm honestly not sure which came first.One of them -- actually, the more I think about it, the more it becomes obvious to me that this was the first one, because I remember writing it in WordPerfect and the other one in Word, and also because I thought of it as incredibly long at the time I wrote it, but the other one was much, much longer. Anyway: I read The Lord of the Rings when I was nine, is possibly the first thing you ought to know about this. I was young and easily led; therefore this may not have been my fault.
When I finished The Lord of the Rings, I found the ending to be fundamentally unsatisfying*. I wanted to know, but then what happened? The obvious solution quickly presented itself. So I wrote some fanfic.
It primarily involved Sam Gamgee's eldest daughter, Elanor, and Gandalf. (Yes, Gandalf sailed into the West at the same time as Frodo, at which time Elanor was an infant. No, I did not in any way explain in the story what the hell he was doing back in Middle-Earth.) Amazingly, I still remember in great detail the plot of this fic, which I felt at the time was unbelievably long (five or six printed pages, as I recall, and definitely the longest thing I had written at that time). The main idea was that, because of something in some way related to Sam's travels, Elanor had magical powers**. These powers began to manifest when she was an adolescent, and because she was, frankly, freaking people out, her parents packed her off to go on some sort of Quest Of Understanding with Gandalf. So she went on a Quest Of Understanding, and ended up understanding and learning to control her powers, and went home. Oh, and she saw the elanor flowers that she was named after for the first time, I remember writing that bit as well.
Yes, in five pages. What?
I was ten and a half when the Special Edition versions were released; I had never previously seen or even heard of Star Wars*** and found it to be, frankly, the greatest thing in the entire goddamn world. Nothing had ever reached into the deepest part of my overactive pre-adolescent imagination and snapped it to attention and stood the hairs on the back of my neck on end the way Star Wars did. Nothing has done so since. Nothing has even come close. I had read Lord of the Rings the year before, and boy, had it ever lit my imagination on fire, but it was nothing compared to the way I felt after seeing Star Wars.
I am offering this as, in a certain kind of way, an excuse.
It was about three seconds before I was collaborating with my best friend on what turned out to be an abso-fucking-lutely epic fanfic. The main character of this fanfic, at least from my perspective (the friend had other intentions, which is largely why we never finished the thing), was of course Luke Skywalker's long-lost sister.
... No, his other long-lost sister.
Yes, she looked suspiciously like me.
Yes, she was eleven.
Yes, she had a lightsaber.
Yes, the lightsaber in question had a blade that was more than one color AT THE SAME TIME.
... Look, let's not talk about this anymore.
I wish I could find brief excerpts of these fanfics for you. Unfortunately, since they were written on the computer, I no longer have hard copies of them; they were saved to the hard drives of computers that are now, of course, both obsolete and broken, and although I did back up at least one of them to disk, the disk in question is long since defunct (there was an incident with the Blue Screen of Death some years ago).
* DON'T FORGET TO PUT THE FOOTNOTE HERE IN A MINUTE.
** This was not quite as crackheaded an idea as it sounds. There is a strong suggestion in the end of Return of the King that parts of the Shire, and children born in the Shire after the return of the Fellowship, are not quite the same as they were beforehand, and that this is in some way connected to the soil and seeds given to Sam by Galadriel; describing this effect as fey or elf-touched would not be entirely off target.
*** This is not strictly true; I do remember, as a small child, seeing about two minutes of what I later realized must have been Return of the Jedi on TV. I can't prove that this happened, but at least according to my memory, it was the tail end of the speederbike chase through the forest on Endor, and the first appearance of an Ewok.