Fan Fiction and Me

I was thinking recently about the misconceptions and biases towards Fan Fiction. To those who have never read it, or know what it's about, they usually see it as something "Nerds" or "Wierdos" do. They see it as badly written, and also as mostly slash fiction, that is there solely to quench some sexual desire that the writer has.

In the late 90's (I would have been 10-13 at the time) I wrote fan fiction on half A4 sheets, that I bound with glue in a cardboard, and tried to make books. They were Star Trek DS9 stories and were absolute trash with no merit to them whatsoever. They usually involved them flying somewhere in the Defiant, finding some-thing and then flying home again jiggidy-jig. At some point I stopped doing it as I grew up and the very memory of it vanished until recently.

Jump to 2005. I thought that fan fiction was trash. I'd never read any, but I thought it was trash. I thought that Fan Fiction prose was just Kirk/Spock stuff that I had no interest in reading that.

Around this time I saw a Fan Production by the name of Star Trek New Voyages: Come What May. It was truly terrible. I thought it was nothing more than a stupid 'High School Play' level of production. I shook my head and thought that fan-made stuff was simply garbage. (Come What May is still truly awful)

It wasn't until I caught their episode To Serve All My Days, did I start to take notice of what fans were capable of. I waited with a strange excitement when I saw their trailer for World Enough and Time, which at the time I kept calling "World Not Enough and Time" for some reason. In fact my last name appeared in the e-mags they used to release, with my short forum review and my forum name (which was my last name) misspelled in it.

Anyway, this took me onto the Audio-Drama side of things. Things I could listen to when walking. I caught something done by Darker Projects, but they mixed in other Sci-Fi universes and I didn't like that. I also listened to Star Trek: Defiant (Which has since vanished from the face of the internet) and then later Star Trek: Outpost (Which I still listen too)

But before Outpost and after Defiant, I read my first full Fan Fiction. It was a TOS fan fic detailing Scotty's time at the academy. I think this was 2009 or 10. I wish I knew what it was called. All I know was that it wasn't on the Fan Fiction site, and on another with a load of other fan fics. I know the cover image was of a bridge or something. I really enjoyed it and now am quite sad that I cannot find it again.

Then As I'm writing this, I found the story on Ad Astra, an archive for Trek Fan-fic. It's called On the Nature of Wind. This was the story that made me second guess the legitimacy of prose in Fan-fiction.

Jump ahead (or maybe this happened before reading On the Nature of Wind, I can't remember) I wanted to do something with Audio. It never came about, but instead Ideas for writing came about. I think in an earlier post I mentioned it when discussing my Trek story that is sadly on hiatus right now.

Anyway, at this point I still had no real interest in reading it, even if I wanted to start writing it. Though it wasn't for a year or two till I started writing, and strangely enough it was Elder Scrolls and Fallout that I started with. I continued with ES and Fallout kind of fell by the wayside, and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to add a Trek story to the mix (Don't try and write more than one story at a time. You'll either lose interest in all three, or two of them won't see an update for MONTHS)

At some point I started to take a gander at other fan-fics. I would tell you my first favourite (Which I favourited to know what stories I was reading, but I cannot remember and I'm getting a 408 time-out error when I try and access my profile on FanFiction.net. and has completely ruined the end of this post.

JG

Edit:
Heh, my first favourite is a story I've not actually read.
Second is Solace in the Sand by Banger1897, a Fallout Fan-Fic that I haven't read any of the updates in a few months.
Third is Accident and Destiny by SuperGreG. The first Elder Scrolls Fan-Fic I saw that wasn't "The Ever Repeated Adventures of the Champion of Cyrodiil/the Dragonborn" Four days later I favourited his second.
My foray into the world of written FF is a rather new one, and I'm glad I found it.

JG