Beyond Selidor

We're up to Day Six of the fandom meme:

F: What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom? What fandom was it?

I'm not loving the past tense here, since I am very much still in the fandom in question.

I had to cast my mind back to remember which of my book fandoms was the book I read first, but thankfully I have a very good long-term memory, particularly for stuff like the time and circumstances in which I read deeply formative books for the first time. So, it's not Gillian Rubinstein's Space Demons trilogy, which I only read for the first time in 1996, it's not the Obernewtyn series (which, although it existed since the late 1980s I only began reading in 1999), it's not any one of the myriad Victor Kelleher books I read since 1996, and it's not even the Pagan Chronicles books, which I only began reading for the first time in 1995 when I was chosen as one of a handful of students from Canberra primary schools to go to an event at the now defunct Griffith public library where we would meet Catherine Jinks and hear her read from the fourth book in the series.

Nope, even that venerable fandom of mine is beaten by Gillian Rubinstein's book Galax Arena, which I first picked out of my school library as a nine-year-old in 1994. It got its claws into me in an intense way. (Among other things, it was the first book that made me realise it was totally acceptable to find a story's narrator and point-of-view character boring and wish that I knew more about the experiences of one of the antagonists, so I think it was also the first book that sparked a fannish 'I want to play around in this story and focus on things that the author didn't focus on' reaction in me.)

I've been in the fandom for this book ever since. Unfortunately, the fandom is basically me and ... silence. There are five fics in this fandom in Ao3. Two are by me. Two are gifts for me from exchanges (thanks, Morbane!). And one is a crossover which takes characters from another fandom and dumps them in the world of Galax-Arena. I wish I liked that kind of crossover, but I'm in fandom almost exclusively for fic focused on the characters I love in the settings that I first encountered them in canon, so while I'm sure that crossover is delightful, it's not for me.

So, yeah. Twenty-six years and counting in this fandom, and I can't see myself ever leaving.

( The other days )

Good morning, and welcome to Day Four of the fandom meme:

D: What was the first thing you ever contributed to a fandom?

My answer to this depends on how you define 'a fandom'. Like most fannish adults, rewriting the endings of my favourite stories, or imagining I was a character in said stories was a major feature of my childhood. Indeed the fact that I a) had very poor hearing as a young child until I got grommets put in my ears to unblock the eustachian tubes and b) generally spent my time imagining I was a character from one of my favourite books doing all the things I did in my daily life meant that I was an extremely vague child who found it very difficult to focus on the words coming out of real-life people's mouths. Because I did this sort of thing for as long as I can remember (I have memories of myself as a three-year-old toddler pretending my doll was a character in a picture book I enjoyed at my childcare centre), it's impossible to name my first 'contribution' to fandom if we're counting childhood play as fannish activity.

If participation in fandom as a shared activity is how you're defining it, it would have been some time around the early 2000s, when I first dipped my toes into fan forums for two of my favourite book series: Bridgetothestars, a Philip Pullman fansite with its Republic of Heaven forum, and Obernewtyn.net, a fansite for Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series. I made a couple of posts, but at the time was not very interested in the internet and mostly just wanted to be on my own reading books, so I drifted away until 2007, when a combination of intense situational depression, and living away from my support network forced me back online in a kind of desperation. Both sites welcomed me with open arms, and on the Republic of Heaven in particular I racked up a massive post count. Over the years I met most of the people on those sites in real life — the Obernetters were easier, as almost everyone on that site lived in Australia, whereas apart from lowercasename, all the Pullman fans lived in Europe or North America, so I didn't meet most of them until I moved to the UK. I wouldn't be able to track down my first 'contribution' to either site, but it would have been a post replying in some way to some discussion thread about either series.

If your definiation of fandom solely relates to fanworks posted online in shared spaces, that's easy: it's 'Bodies of Clay', the first fic I published on Ao3, back in 2012:

Bodies of Clay (3638 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 10/10
Fandom: Pagan Chronicles
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Isidore Orbus/Babylonne Kidrouk
Characters: Isidore Orbus, Babylonne Kidrouk
Summary:

Ten moments in Isidore and Babylonne's life together. Post Pagan's Daughter/Babylonne.

How would you define 'fannish activity'?

( The other days )

Today is day one of the fandom meme that I mentioned a few posts back. I'm going to try to stick to one a day for the first 26 days of April. Let's see how I go. Today's prompt is:

A: Ships that you currently like a lot. (They don’t have to be OTPs because not everyone has OTPs.) Friendships, pairings, threesomes, etc. are allowed.

As you are all probably well aware, I mostly only feel fannish about old, old book fandoms which I've loved since I was a child with a fannish devotion that has not dimmed in twenty years. So 'currently' is possibly a bit redundant here — I can't think of any recent canon which made me feel this way.

( Old(ish) books )

( The other days )

If anyone missed it yesterday, I'm interested in writing letters to people. If you'd like a letter from me, here's how to get one.