Notice
"Why does everyone diss new fanfic writers? They're twelve!
What did we write when we were twelve? Crap, that's what!"
--Starhawk
1)My first fanfic was about me and Alex and Jeremy living on the starship Enterprise.
2)We shared a room and we worked on the Bridge and we played soccer in our downtime.
3)Actually, we got all the senior officers to play soccer with us in our downtime.
4)I got it published by one of the room mothers and everything, complete with cover and illustrations my dad helped me draw from a grainy TV and a VCR stuck on pause.
5)That was in third grade. I was just reading it the other day.
6)Then in sixth grade, I was bummed that Spock never had a female romantic interest that lived so I decided to change that.
7)I wrote several stories about Saera, the half-Vulcan first officer from a scientific research ship.
8)Saera was a funny girl. She long hair and pet ferrets and she got away with everything.
9)And when I started watching DS9, of course Saera knew Odo (she lived a long time) and she helped fix him up with Kira.
10)The next fanfiction I remember was in high school, basically whenever I had to write a science report and didn't want to.
11)There were these two girls, original characters of course, that attended Starfleet Academy and were forever getting into trouble while they were supposed to be--surprise--writing science reports.
12)I'm trying to think of their names. Meira and... Lei, maybe?
13)I should know, I used them enough, but I can't remember.
14)I think one of them was a Romulan.
15)I wrote some Zeo Power Rangers stuff in there too, mostly bad poems and a narrative version of the episode where the Gold Ranger first appears.
16)I liked that episode a lot...
17)Anyway, my other writing didn't seem to suffer for all this random fanfiction on the side--there was some Babylon 5 too, I think, the summer before John's wife came back when there was that great preview of Delenn dropping the snowglobe and it shattering on the floor.
18)In the meantime I was writing highly unrealistic stories about smugglers and space stations and energy healing and girls with dogs that discovered magical islands.
19)Not much has changed, of course, I still write things I know nothing about with too many original characters in my fanfic and too many fanfic ideas in my original writing.
20)But you know what matters? I write.
21)I don't wait until I see more, or know more, or understand better. I just write.
22)And when someone asks me what I do in my spare time, I don't say, "I write good stuff," or "I write bad stuff", I just say, "I write." Because that's what I do.
23)And when someone asks me, someday, whether I can look back and say that I really lived, I won't say, "I lived well," or "I lived poorly," I'll just say, "Yeah... I lived."
24)Because the only way to live is to do it. Not to wait for the right moment, that day when you suddenly know everything and can do it all perfectly--that's not living.
25)Living is doing.
26)Writing is doing.
27)Everyone write, dammit. No matter who tells you not to.
Run Away