This is a bit of an observation I've had in my head for quite a while now, and I'm finally getting around to doing something with it.
Before I get to it, I should give a little background. Over the last couple years, at the time of this writing, I've been working on reposting some of the old fan works I'd done for various things when I was in high school and college, for the most part. Some of it, mostly the Mystery Science Theater stuff I've been posting to this blog, is newer than that, but pretty much everything else is stuff I wrote and shared in America Online's Cartoon Forum between 1994 and 2001, roughly. This would have been between my junior year of high school and when I finished my first degree in 2001.
As part of the process of all this, I've been going through to clean up the formatting a bit and fix a few minor errors as I come across them. It's been an interesting experience, in part for nostalgia's sake, and in part because I'm seeing how I've progressed as a writer and a fiction author over the years. I've come quite a ways, I think, and I'm not sure if I'm proud of myself or not, to be honest.
What really got me to thinking about all this is that I'm finally getting to the first storyline or arc sort of thing I ever did. It was based on the Saturday Morning/Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog line, and primarily featured my own fan character, a human named Shamus O'Reiley, who had come from Earth and wound up losing his spaceship and his brother the day he got there, becoming trapped.
Before I started on this, I'd gotten the first two more-or-less chapters of the story arc pretty much ready to go for posting on a site called An Archive Of Our Own, which hosts quite a lot of fan works for just about everything one might be a fan of. Worth checking out if you're interested in that sort of thing. But, I digress.
I bring up those two chapters specifically because the first chapter I wrote was pretty much the first or second thing I'd ever offered up for wide public consumption in that manner, and the second actually came much later in my career, being the second to last thing I ever wrote fully using that character, I think. In both cases, it really shows, and I gotta say, I'm kind of embarrassed by that.
It's not so much that the story itself is particularly bad, at least in my own opinion. It's just that the way it's presented is... not good, to put it mildly, particularly in that first chapter. What became the second was noticibly better, if only because it's being compared to a low bar. My progression follows more naturally from what became the thrid chapter of this particular arc.
This brings us to the observation I was mentioning at the top of the post. See, back in the day, I was coming into all this knowing that it would probably not be much more than a hobby, a fun way to kill time. That might be why I had the balls to continue with it long enough to get as good at it as I am. I still like to read fan fiction even if I don't write as much as I used to. There are quite a few authors of various sorts I follow around the web, mostly on a site called FurAffinity, at the moment.
There are a couple that come to mind as an example of what I've noticed here. I'm going to ignore subject matter in this case, because there are enough similarities in that regard to keep things relatively equal. I'll spare everybody links, simply because I'm not sure of what overall interests are. One does work that reminds me of my earliest stuff and gets commissions for it; the other's material is like what I hope my more recent output is like and does it on his own.
For the most part, this is just a thing I'd noticed that's made me think. There are clearly stories present in all cases, even if the writing isn't what one might call great. It makes me wonder where I'd be with all of this if I'd been getting money for my earliest stuff and/or if I'd started fifteen years later.
No comments:
Post a Comment