Celebration!

Last weekend I posted my 40th fanfiction over at FF.net. As of this past October, I have been a member of that site for nearly five years, since the 8th grade, when I bravely ventured out from my floppy-disk bound writing endeavors into the big wide world of public critique.

Let's see how times have changed, shall we?

First off, I no longer save my stories on floppy disks. In fact, the computer on which I now save my stories no longer has a space for floppy disks. My first public story was a Lord of the Rings parody of Wierd Al's Phantom Menace, written with some help from my friend Katie on the way between her house and mine for an occasion that has gone beyond memory. My 40th story was a Kingdom of Heaven fic explaining a minor incident in my Song of a Peacebringer fic (I think we could start calling it a fanfiction novella at this point -- it's 114 pages long...)

My first contributions to FF.net were in the Lord of the Rings archive, centered on Boromir, my first real literary crush. My first large piece of work was The Meaning and Mystery of the Rose, a Lord of the Rings story I affectionately called 'My Baby' for a long time because it was the longest thing I'd ever written. I wrote each chapter in a separate document, so it's difficult to say how many pages long it actually was, but FF.net puts the word count at around 53,821 words, including, of course, the Author's Notes that were regrettably common in those days. Song of a Peacebringer (which is being composed in a single document and parsed out into separate chapters) is, at the time of this blogging, some 55,178 words long. And it's not quite done, either.

Goodness, how times have changed -- I'm still verbose and still writing obscenely long fanfic.

Today my high school friend Catroux interviewed me for a paper she's writing on fanfiction and identity in teenagers -- hopefully, if she says yes, I'll post an edited (for continuity) copy of that interview up for you to read and learn a little bit about me and my journey as a fanfiction writer. And hopefully she'll post some of her paper, too...

Speaking of papers, I don't know if I ever told you all that my own paper on fanfiction (the one mentioned here, here, and here on this blog) is going to be presented by yours truely at Scholarship and Creativity day! Not everyone gets to do that, you know. You've got to special. Ground-breaking.

So, share around the balloons, have a slice of CAKE


-- and celebrate this milestone with me! What milestone, you ask?

The milestone of being thought important and authoritative enough to interview!