Challenge #7

The Ferris Wheel

Journaling: Life in fandom goes through ups and downs. Reminisce about the "wild ride" of your time in fandom or in other online communities.

The net wasn’t around when I was a teenager, but if it had, I’m sure I would have written fanfiction. Because even if I didn’t write them down, I did long and elaborate stories about The Lord of the Rings in my head. First merely adding a female companion to the fellowship, but after I read Silmarillion I made up more independent characters and adventures. I’m sorry I never did write them down, but I still have some of the synopsis for them.

I ventured online for the first time in early 1999. My son was a newborn, and one sleepless night I did a search for Dorothy L. Sayers and found a mailgroup that had just decided on a read.through of all her books. It was my first online community, and we had so much fun. Now, 26 years later, I´m still in contact with some of them. At some point we decided to write a round robin to create Harriet Vane’s fictitious detective novel Death 'Twixt Wind and Water, as it has a fair amount of clues to reconstruct. It was great fun, and the first time I wrote fiction in English. This mailgroup also introduced the concept of fanfiction to me, as some members also wrote Harry Potter fic. 

For a couple of years I read fanfiction now and then, but never considered writing it. That changed when I happened to see a promo shot of Jason Isaacs as Captain Hook in Peter Pan in 2003. Peter Pan was one of my childhood favourites, and this picture triggered me into writing. For about 2 years I wrote feverishly, and wrote some really dark fanfic. And wrote myself into dealing with some trauma from my teens. To cut a rather long process very short, writing fanfic helped me heal in a way I had not foreseen, and was instrumental in shedding a depression I had lived in for years.

I didn’t write much between 2005-2013, even if I did write from time to time. I divorced, and juggling work and being a single mother gave me little time and energy for it. Even when life settled down I had got out of the habit to write, but in 2013 there was a sudden death in my family. It was a terrible and traumatic experience, and it triggered me into another feverish writing spell. I had just re-watched Doctor Who, from the First Doctor and onwards, and I started writing Whofic. 

Once again I found writing very therapeutic, but after the first rush of writing I realised something I never consciously realised before. I love writing. It’s good for my well=being, regardless if I write a blogpost or a fic. Up until early 2022 I wrote steadily, exploring  a number of fandoms and ships. Then I had a creative freeze when the war in Ukraine happened. I couldn’t do anything creative at all for a long time, and only got back to writing on a regular basis earlier this year. It feels good to be back!

As of now I have 123 fics on AO3 in 26 fandoms. 94 of those one-shots. I mostly write het, with a preference for strong and competent female characters and morally ambiguous male ones. I just checked, the ratio looks like this, F/M (80 fics), Gen (33), F/F (7), M/M (5), Multi (5). All my fics are in a historical and/or fantastical fandom. As a history nerd I spend a lot of time researching history when I write.

My fanfics can be found here.