Writing (Part Two)

A word about fan fiction. I don't have a thing against fan fiction. It's a good place for a young writer (like I was) to learn their chops. I still read fan fiction sometimes; some of it sucks, some of it doesn't. But that doesn't mean I disapprove. I mostly wrote Trek fiction (because I have always been a huge Star Trek fan), though, thank God, none of it saw the light of day; nobody ever read them but me (and my sister Lil, who would sometimes sneak into my secret stash and write nasty little comments in the the margins, the little snot! Big sisters suck sometimes). I did self-insert fic, but luckily, I never often fell into the Mary Sue trap, thank God, but that was because my fantasies had always been .... well, not odd, but just different. I was never one to fantasize about having somebody -- real or imaginary -- fall in love with me. Even then I knew, on some instinctual level, for girls, lovers could be had without too much effort: all you had to be was willing, and not too picky (which is not a criticism of my husband; I can't believe how lucky I got there!).

No, I fantasized about the one thing that I didn't have, and couldn't figure out how to get: friends. I didn't want Captain Kirk and Spock to fall in love with me. I wanted them to respect me, to accept me as I was, and be my friends. And my stories reflected that.

My dad was the one who got me over fan fiction, and in the oddest way, when I was about twelve. We were driving through Catlettsburg one time, and there's this one little place in town where the local garden club had planted a bunch of flowers and a dogwood tree, city beautification, you know the game. In the middle of this tiny little garden, there was a stone monument saying something to the effect of "the work of the Gate City Garden Club." To my twelve year old eyes, it looked like a gravestone, and, being a smartass, I said, "Does that mean the Gate City Garden Club is buried there?" My dad, God love him, laughed his ass off at that, which was like applause to me and my imagination. It set off a story idea in my head.

I ended up writing a very silly story about the Catlettsburg Garden Club (in my story, they were all a bunch of old ladies who spiked their tea with brandy and were pretty damned snooty, which may be true, for all I know, I've never met a member). In the story, they buy a plant from a stranger, and it ends up being sorta like "Little Shop of Horrors" (which I had never heard of at the time): the plant is actually from outer space, eats all the members of the club, and transforms into a sort of vegetable vampire, taking human form and leaving town to go find new Garden Clubs to eat.

Come on, I was twelve.

My daddy LOVED that story, laughed his ass off at it (maybe he knew some of the actual Garden Club members, who knows), and to his dying day, admonished me with, "I don't know why you don't clean that story up and send it out to a magazine."

From there, I was off and running. Why write fan fiction, which I felt like I had to hide, when I could write stuff that my dad and mom could read and love? I wrote and wrote and wrote, anything I could think of: horror, sf, more horror, fantasy, even a little erotica (as I got older; I got over that fast, and I NEVER showed that to Mom and Dad). Mom spent thirty years teaching literature and grammar, so she would bloody my pages, correcting grammar and spelling, teaching me how to form good paragraphs and control the language. My dad was an even more rabid reader than I was, so he taught me how to control story, pacing, what constituted good story versus cliche, etc. Luckily, I had always had a good ear for dialogue (my mom says it's from having been trained as a musician. But then again, as a musician, she always thinks that anything good I do has something to with being trained as a musician).

However it happened, I had a good education. I sold my first piece, a non-fiction article on the Lewis and Clark expedition, when I was seventeen. Wow! People can make money from writing? Whoda thunk? That's when I really dug in and started educating myself, beyond what Mom and Dad could do for me. I bought books on writing, I took classes, and I wrote and i wrote and I wrote. From the day I turned about fourteen, I have written a thousand words a day, every day. I'm forty four now; think about how many words I have generated. I don't even want to try to do the math on that.

I didn't have a lot of success with my short fiction, but my non-fiction was enough to get me a position on a "little" magazine as a contributing editor. Mostly my job was to do reviews of gaming systems (I've been a D&D player since I was about fourteen), but I managed to slip a few pieces of fiction in there, too. I did that for a while, but I had four children by this time, the oldest about ten, the two youngest still in diapers. I had to prioritize my life. My writing was not going to earn me a living right now, and I had other responsibilities. So I stopped trying to "be a writer." But I never stopped writing. I think i wrote five novels in that time frame, and dozens of short stories, stuff that I never even TRIED to market; they were just to keep my hand in, and to keep learning. Writing is a never ending learning process.

Part of it was confidence, too. I know I made my mom and dad laugh, and my friends loved what I wrote, but the few times I did submit to professional publications, I got shot down. There's only so much of that you can take before your confidence takes a nosedive. And so it was with me. I couldn't stop writing; it just wasn't in me to stop. But submitting was just too painful.

Then, in 1999, I discovered the Internet, and joined a PBEM (that's Play by E-Mail) Trek RPG game. It's called Borderlands, and here's a link if you're interested http://pbem-portal.com/trek/borderlands/. It hearkened back to my old fan fiction days, and it was a comfy place to write and let strangers read my work. I have played with these guys off and on for the last ten years, and it was very good for me. I made some incredibly good friends, it helped me learn about character, and it helped build up my confidence, which had been so very shattered.

Which more or less brings us up to today. My confidence was back where it needed to be, my children were old enough that I was less a mother and more a referee/adviser, and I felt like I had learned enough about writing to really give it another go. And that's what I'm doing now: writing my fingers off, submitting, sometimes with success, sometimes not.

I'm working on another novel now, and I feel really confident about it. I feel like I have the chops, I have the right character, the right plot, and it's the right time. It's been a long time coming, but I think I might just succeed with this one.

But even if I don't, even if I never ever sell another piece of writing again for as long as I live, I do NOT regret all those words I've written in my life. Writing has been and still is the most satisfying, gratifying, FUN thing I have ever done in my life, and I hope I'm still writing on the day I die.