How I Got Started in Fan Fiction

There's an argument on Twitter at the moment which started when someone (I'm not linking to it) said rude things about fan fiction writers.

I'm proud to be a fan fiction writer - and I'm incredibly grateful for all the fan fiction writers on AO3.  Reading their stories helped keep me sane through 2020 (yes, even the ones which didn't meet professional standards - they were written with love, and the writers were doing their best).

So, I started writing fan fiction when I was 12.

I shared a bedroom with my sister, and I used to tell her bedtime stories until she fell asleep, which I made up myself.  Then I started writing the stories down.  I was reading my way through the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome at the time, so my stories were heavily based on them.  I was also a great fan of old pirate movies that were shown in the afternoons on weekend TV, and some of my plots were based on them.  In the process, I turned Nancy and Peggy Blackett into 18th century pirates and based them in Cornwall, with a ship called the Sea Witch.  I was also reading my dad's collection of Richard Bolitho novels, which gave me all the knowledge of sails and rigging I needed.  I can still tell the difference between a sloop, a barquentine and a ship of the line.

I didn't know it at the time, but what I was doing was writing Swallows and Amazons AU crossover fan fic, and I was having enormous fun.

None of these stories ever went further than a folder in my bedroom, where they were written out in felt tip pen.

I doubt if there are many Starship Excalibur zines still around from the early 1980s, but when I joined Star Trek fandom in my late teens, I wrote for them.  Looking back now, some of those stories were quite embarrassing - more enthusiasm than skill - but I got enough encouragement to keep doing it, and I kept improving.  My proudest moment was to write a Deep Space Nine story without ever having seen an episode of Deep Space Nine!  The new series had just started, and I knew some of the details, but I didn't have a TV at the time.  I wrote a story about Keiko O'Brien setting up her school and dealing with a problem Andorian pupil, and I seemed to get it right.

I spent many years not writing at all, for various reasons, but eventually I decided to make my best attempt at becoming a published writer, and started writing original fiction.  I got as far as getting a personalised rejection letter from an agent.  So I knew my writing was almost professional standard, but I also knew I wasn't going to get any better than I already was.  

I self-published the stories on Smashwords (see the side bar).

Then I went to Dublin WorldCon, where the AO3 website won a Hugo.  I'd heard of AO3 before that, but it seemed so huge that I kind of bounced off it.  This gave me the impetus to try again.

Last year, I wrote nearly 60,000 words of fan fiction.  Some of it was incredibly niche - I think I'm the only person to ever have written a fan fic for The Flashing Blade, which all of 6 people have read!  I've also written Lord Peter Wimsey fan fiction, in which Lord Peter became Lady Petra - working out how the plots would have changed if Lord Peter was a woman was fun.  (Bunter became Myrtle Bunter, too).  The first story I tried was about The Saint, since I was re-watching the old Roger Moore series and trying to make sense of his confusing and possibly contradictory back-story.

And I've written a lot of Good Omens fan fic, too.

So there we are - I'm proud of being a fan fic writer, and reader.  If it's comfort reading, well, I'm not the only person who needed comfort reading last year, and the process of creation has been very satisfying (I love doing research!).

I'm also very grateful that sites like AO3 exist, because I can remember the days when fan fiction writers could be sued - in fact, Anne McCaffrey once threatened to sue me, so that Star Trek/Pern crossover never saw the light of day!

Fan Fiction, Fictional Archaeologists, and Libraries

 I love writing fan fiction.  The research for a story can lead me down the most interesting rabbit holes.

In this case, I read a Good Omens fan fic on AO3 called It's Not the Years, It's the Milage, by MovesLikeBucky.  The plot is basically the first Indiana Jones film, but with Aziraphale as Indy and Crowley as Marion, and I enjoyed it enormously.

But before Indiana Jones, there was Pimpernel Smith.

Leslie Howard played the first adventurous archaeologist - Professor Smith, who was in charge of a student dig in Germany just before the Second World War.  When he wasn't directing the students, he was smuggling intellectuals out of Germany before they were arrested by the Nazis.  The film was made in 1941, in black and white, and has a moment of terrible sexism where Professor Smith insults the women archaeology students to make them walk out of the lecture hall, so he can invite only the young men on the student dig with him.  Apart from that, though, it is wonderful fun, with the Nazis puzzled by the tune used to signal to the escaping intellectuals, and a very funny conversation about Shakespeare at an Embassy party.

It occurred to me that Aziraphale would work far better as vague academic Professor Smith than as action hero Indiana Jones - but I didn't want to do a straight swap of the characters.  Aziraphale could go undercover in Germany as an antiquarian bookseller much more easily.

And this is where the research comes in.  I work in a secondhand and antiquarian bookshop, and I had recently been cataloguing some books about Germany.  I noticed that many of them were published in Leipzig.  So Aziraphale could have a bookselling contact in Leipzig he could write to.  I discovered that Leipzig was, indeed, a centre for book publishing - and that there had been a terrible air raid in 1943 which destroyed the booksellers' quarter (the Graphisches Viertel), including the oldest music publishing house in the world, along with an estimated 50 million books.  The German National Library was badly hit.  1,800 people also died in the RAF raid.

That happened after the period I wanted to set my story, though.

I wanted Aziraphale to buy a collection of occult books, possibly from a castle somewhere.  Thuringia sounded like an interesting location, not too far from Leipzig, so I started to look at local castles - and hit solid gold!

The Duchess Anna Amalia Library is still housed in the Green Castle in Weimar.  In the 1930s it was known as the Ducal Library, and it had been a library since Duke Wilhelm Ernst started it in 1691.  Duchess Anna Amalia moved it to its present location in 1761.  It houses important collections of Shakespeare and Goethe, and a 16th century bible connected to Martin Luther.

Aziraphale would be in Paradise!

Even better, it looks like this:

It even has a book tower that reminded me of Aziraphale's shop:

There was a serious fire there in 2004, but it has been wonderfully restored, as the pictures show.

And now I want to visit Weimar....

Organization for Transformative Works Elections

 I first became aware of AO3 (Archive of Our Own) last year, when I started dipping my toes in the shallows of some of the fan fiction I was most familiar with.  

Then there was the wonderful moment during the Hugo Ceremony at DublinCon when AO3 won the Hugo for Best Related Work, and the lights went up on the audience so that everyone who had written fan fiction on the site or been involved in AO3 stood up - because this Hugo was for all of them.

After that, I started writing fan fiction again, after a break of many years (I used to write Star Trek fan fiction for fanzines like Starship Excalibur, when the original 79 episodes were all the Star Trek that existed).

I've been having fun - I changed the ending of The Flashing Blade, which has been bugging me for nearly 50 years, so the hero chooses the right girl; I turned Lord Peter Wimsey into Lady Petra and wrote about her experiences in the Great War; and I tried to make sense of The Saint's timeline in the Roger Moore series.

I also wrote a story that brought together all the fictional jewel thieves in Europe with The Champions, set Liz Shaw and Kate Stewart on a new path to keeping the Earth safe after UNIT was defunded, and wrote a few little Aziraphale and Crowley scenes (they are such fun to write!).

I've also read some awesomely good fan fiction, and some that might not be technically very good but which was obviously written with love (I'd put some of my own fiction in the 'technically not very good' category - the main thing for me was having fun writing it), and I've started following some of the authors on Tumblr.

And, since I was using the site, I sent a couple of small donations when they asked.

So I was delighted to be eligible to vote in the elections for new Board members.  Reading the bios of the candidates, I learned a lot about what goes on behind the scenes to keep the site running.  There are hundreds of volunteers organising, translating, tag-wrangling, dealing with legal issues, and more.

AO3 is part of the Organization for Transformative Works, which also covers Fanlore, Transformative Works and Culture, Fanhackers and Open Doors.

It's nice to be able to vote for something positive.

Archive Of Our Own - Fan Fiction

Archive of our Own, or AO3, is the website that won the Hugo for hosting fan fiction, and I thought I'd like to find out a bit more about it. I did try looking at it during the voting period for the Hugos, but it's so vast I kind of bounced off. There are fandoms represented on there that I've never heard of, and even with the ones I am familiar with, it's a puzzle to know where to start.
So I thought I'd start with something small.
Looking down the 'S' section, I found The Saint - and there were only 6 stories there. When I looked at the descriptions of the stories, I found that one was a crossover between The Saint and The Man from UNCLE. That seemed like my cup of tea - I'm familiar with both series. I didn't pay much attention to who wrote it.
When I clicked to open the story, I got an Adult Content warning.
Now, I used to read a lot of Star Trek fan fiction back in the 1980s. I'm familiar with K/S and hurt/comfort - I have fond memories of the Variations on a Theme series. So I had a vague idea of what I was letting myself in for here.
We start in the middle of a mission gone wrong - and Napoleon Solo meets the Saint (Illya being unconscious at the time). The Saint takes them to a remote cottage and leaves them there. Hot sex ensues. I'll never look at Illya Kuryakin the same way again!
It was a lot of fun.
I might try some Star Trek next time.... or maybe some Good Omens - I've been reading some very good fan fiction about Aziraphale and Crowley on the Tardis Stowaway blog, and some of it is just adorable!