#ficafic

Taking aim on Fanfiction of a Fanfiction - a story of recursion.

And then came that day.

"I'm too old for this shit," I said, putting away my fan fiction. I've said everything about Star Trek, Wars, Gate, and Man that I have to say. Alien Nation? Done. Firefly? Done. Merry and Pippin's happy ending after LOTR? Done. Elfquest? Dorsai? Buffy? Done. The bloody paper trail of angsty happiness dusted with dried tears and wet kisses long lost to the halls of Etsy, eBay, and other auction sites where old Fanzines go to find new homes in shelved lives.

When I felt 'the urge' (Urge. You know. Wink-wink. Urge, eh, he said knowingly.) I could slide onto Live Journal or a funky webring, check out FFN or Tumblr or K/S Archive to get that reading fix. Alas, eventually that, too lost it's glamour. Close Account. Close Account. Close Account. Close.the.Account.

Get to work, boy. You got STD (shit-to-do ... get your mind outta the Newsroom acronyms) And so I did.

As we age and people begin to realize you've been in that tenured office long enough, there are assumptions made about your arcane-ness. One day you find yourself having coffee with twenty and thirty somethings that feel the need to explain the values of transformational works to your aged ass.

"You mean, fanfiction?" you ask. "Um... yeah," they hesitate in response. And your eye roll will be taken for the dismissiveness of age rather than the tiredness of having to explain yourself to others throughout your life.

That's where my sense of unreal-reality kicked in - because I'm still that 10 year old kid waiting in line for The Empire Strikes Back premier with my cousin. (Blessings to my twenty-something half-cousin from Iowa who drove 6 hours to my Grandparents in St.Louis just to take me to see a film I wasn't going to get to see because it was PG and "that star tracking crap" (GPa's description). (Oh, and, TY cousin Rosie-Rosie... you are forever my X-Wing Fighter.)

I'm still all the people I have ever been and have a body of work out there on shelves and in dusty boxes under five psueds - some male, some female - that prove that ... yes... "Yes, Carl. I know what fanfiction is."

It was work back in the day to develop a full blown fandom-habit! You had to have a certain amount of cash flow to actively participate with others in Fandom. But, after all the time growing those worlds... they just fluttered away in the mean light of adulting. And I tell my young colleagues that, they too, may experience the flattening of the world thusly.

That's it. The End.

Except... like a Terminator's rerouting signal blinking in the corner of my visual cortex... there...is...this...thing... that I came across in a forgotten notebook: two stapled stories written by friends.

A long, long, long time ago someone shoved one of those stapled stories under my nose because I had said, "Nope - that [ship]* is not a thing. I don't see it. At all. Nope." (*we didn't call it a ship, that slang had not yet been invented. We said things like: "I don't see them together" meaning Slashing). The slashing of characters in the mid-80s was still a relatively new device and easily shrugged off or outright DENIED. Which - I did... in this case. That, plus, the story had a 'tiger or lady' ending... (Which... eye-roll... HSET aka high school English trauma.)

But... the story... the story made a plausible beginning to a questionable slashing that was the darling pair of Miami Vice fanfiction print zine publications everywhere. I, might, possibly be less resistant to the idea of these two very different characters being something together after reading Barb Lewis' story. Perhaps. Maybe.

In the second story - mutual friend SK Gates - wrote a 'lady' ending for the first work as a tribute to the original author. This would have been a fanfic of a fanfic - except that it was only distributed between friends in a first draft copy and never published in a fanzine. The work was finally handed to an editor in preparation for a 2020 publication on the year anniversary of Barb Lewis' passing - when the unthinkable happened. SKGates, too, died.

This is the reality of Fandom. The original writers and artist have been slowly, but surely, leaving this Universe for something beyond - leaving works on pages in boxes and in archives behind digital walls.

Finding both works in one place after Lewis' and Gates' deaths was a shocking moment. NGL - there were tears through that first reading. Then, marveling at the fact that both stories were Smith-Cornona machine typed... I read them again and again and again. Somewhere in all the reading I called Rosie - remember her ↑ (my X-Wing Fighter) and asked if she remembered. Of course she did. She was Gates' editor. That was three years ago.

Since then I've been obsessed with two questions:

what would the tiger do?

should I write fanfic of their fanfiction?

So thus began my journey into Recursive Fsnfiction or fic of fic (which one day will show up as a portmanteau with capitalization... something like Ficafic©) or 3rd Generation Fanfiction- what ever you choose. Paying particular attention to both source fan works, I've tried to incorporate enough but not too much in tribute. It isn't difficult - but it is time consuming - balancing the original fanfics along with the Canon material and timeline then overlaying original content. But - it can be done.

Writer's Glock — where an idea hits you like a bullet and the only way to heal is to write until all that can be said about the source of that idea is said and you can move on.

I didn't plan on writing fanfiction again in my lifetime - and yet - here I am. Completely rusty but working lube (pun intended) into those creative writing joints to write another day...and another...and another... but with a lot of help (TY Catherine and Rose) I'm working up to writing trim. There are currently some 117K words covering four out of five works to this cathartic exorcism posted on AO3. The series is called The Lewisverse after storyteller, writer, witch, and Collie rescuer Barb Lewis. Mostly this series is me remembering friends who have passed and hoping to bring attention to their names, their place in Fandom history. And this it has done. (Note - there are many unsung fanfiction writers out there in print who will never be archived on easily accessed archive.)

LESSONS LEARNED:

Never say no to a ship no matter how improbable.

You are never to old to pick up the pen (again).

Should Writer's Glock hit you - don't ask "should I". Do it.

Recursive fanfiction is worth doing well - be respectful.

And maybe, most important - enjoy your Fandom friends to the fullest while they are with you. There will come a day when their stories end. Be there until that time.

And, related to this ↑ tell their stories when they are gone.