Sometimes it just feels good to sit and write.
I don't have anything in particular I want to say at this point, or anything of real interest to talk about right now. Sure, there are things I could, and maybe even should, post right now, but there are some I want to step away from for awhile, and others that would take more effort than I want to make at this juncture. So what I think I'll do here is a bit of personal history that I'm not afraid to talk about randomly..
I've been writing for a long time, really. The seed got planted in the fifth or sixth grade, when the teacher gave us a fiction writing assignment for reading class or language arts. I can't remember a lot of the details of it, but I do remember that what I turned in was this goofball story that was essentially a really weird piece of Real Ghostbusters fanfiction. What made it all the more bizarre is that everybody had to read what we'd written aloud to the class, and I was more worried about my ability to perform in front of a crowd than I was embarrassed about what I had written.
But as I said, that was just the seed being planted. That seed germinated when I was in high school. When I was in the ninth grade, one of the big projects was another fiction writing assignment that somehow got leaked a little too early. From the day I heard about it, I used virtually every study hall I had writing this big, long sci fi story that took place in a very Star Trek universe instead of working on homework. At one time, I still had the handwritten story that I was going to get all typed up and posted to the web. Fortunately, though, that didn't quite happen When the assignment was formally announced, what I produced for the class was another twisted little fanfic, this time loosely based on an early Sonic the Hedgehog comic and a handful of things I'd seen in Mad and Cracked magazines over the years. Eventually, this one did work its way to the Internet. Perhaps sometime when I'm not feeling quite so obligated to take this blog thing I do now "seriously", I'll see if I can find either the story itself or a link to it, if I haven't already posted it here.
An interesting thing to note is that up until 1994 or 1995, I had never heard the term "fan fiction", and didn't even really know or understand what I was doing. That's probably why so much of the stuff I wrote in the five or six years between grade six and my junior year of high school were so far out in left field. I was writing fan fiction, but trying to distance it from the source material so that I could pretend that these ideas I was working with were somehow original.
The volume of what I was writing during those years is larger than I think even I realize. There was the stuff that didn't get saved in any way because it was all hand written and lost in the shuffle of things that I was trying to keep the rest of the world from seeing. And once the Apple IIc+ my folks had bought as a family computer wound up in my room because my mom needed something better to work on her masters degree on, that volume went up a bit and was better saved.
Fortunately, though, that, too, was mostly lost to time not long after. I once half jokingly commented to somebody I knew on AOL that it was a good thing most of that stuff had never made it to the Internet, otherwise I'd have managed to build a good deal more cyber-infamy than I have in writing circles, most notably the Mystery Science Theater community, because my work was weird enough, and even then I was vain and naive enough, that I would have let people use my work for that. I would have had my own section on a site devoted to MST fan fiction called Web Site Number Nine because I was so prolific and would have let the handful of fans of my work talk me into continuing with the characters I'd come up with.
But, as high school and college progressed, I began to drift away from pure fiction in favor of more factual material, based on what I was reading for assignments or those odd school newspaper jobs I'd have. And now I'm doing this blog, which can be very subjective, depending upon the post.
Who knows, maybe this one will serve some purpose for history. I'd certainly like to hope so. But for now, I think I'd better wrap this up. I'm starting to go really long, and there are other things I had intended to do tonight.
See you when I see you again, I guess.
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