Despite the lack of 24-year old girls that watch it, I find that Strong Bad said it best:

“Don’t get me wrong, fans are great. It’s the addition of ‘club’ that totally roons it. Which is the opposite of how it usually works.

(For instance: turkey = mrenh, turkey club = mmmMMRENHhhhh!)…

…So that’s fan clubs, the next worst word you can couple with the word ‘fan’ is, you guessed it, the word ‘fiction.'”

Seriously, though. Fan fiction is the worst. The absolute worst. If one’s diet were comprised of literature, fan fiction would be the triple-dipped-ginormous, fallin’-off-the-cone Haagen Dazs monstrosity that looks so bad it’s got to be good, so you figure, what the heck, you only live once, etc. Then, you indulge in a bite or two, and before you know it, you’re curled up on your bed with a stomach ache and a pillow over your head and whimpering that you should’ve read John Steinbeck instead (which is the literary/dietary equivalent of steamed broccoli: nutritious, and it keeps you regular).

Here’s the worst part: I used to pen a few fanfics in my day. I have notebooks hidden in super-secret locations that are chock full of different stories all scrawled out to improbable lengths about all sorts of fandoms I subscribed to, dating all the way back to elementary school. They were so zealously written into the wee hours of the night (well, of course the Backstreet Boys have to go into outer space! It only makes perfect sense!), and they were all so bad, you guys. So sappy and improbable and played for juvenile laughs that I’m still embarrassed to read through them.

And then, around high school, I discovered that not only did other teenage fangirls (and boys) write fiction about their favorite band/show/movie/candle, but they published them. It became immortalized in this greeeat big infinitely large book called The Internet.

Boy howdy. I just had to get me a piece of that pie.

By the time I was, say, sixteen or seventeen, I had immersed myself into a fandom that lasted a good few years: Newsies. (Yes, Virginia, the original Kenny Ortega cinematic endeavor that fizzled faster than you can say “I’m the king of New York.”) It’s such a lousy movie in so many ways, but man alive, if it doesn’t have a following that’ll rival HSM to its pom-poms. And it’s charming to those of us who like a little musical number sprinkled into our period-piece films about life as an impoverished New York City youth in 1899. That, and Christian Bale does his version of that solo dance Kevin Bacon did in Footloose, except Kevin Bacon did it better, and that’s not saying much. (Might also be the reason why Mr. Bale spends most of his time cussing out DPs to viral lengths these days, but that’s another discourse for another day.)

The thing with Newsies was… there were a lot of characters to work with. You had at least a dozen of the usual suspects (Jack “Cowboy” Kelly, David Jacobs, Les Jacobs, Spot Conlon, Racetrack, Kid Blink, Skittery, Pie Eater, Snoddy, Crutchy, Boots, Specs, Dutchy, Bumlets, Snipeshooter… a lot of rejected names for the seven dwarfs, seems like, or at least Lost Boys). And then you had other characters that served as other sorts of archetypes (Sarah Jacobs, for example, was rarely seen in a favorable light since she ended up with Christian Bale’s character in the end, and us girls never quite took to that). That was to say nothing of the characters we could create, and create we did. My favorite was a little mouse of a girl named Belle Malone. Didn’t model her as much after myself as other writers would do, but she was dear to me.

The point of this whole string of drivel is that, just yesterday, I re-stumbled across my old page on Fanfiction.net. Since then, all I can do is read my old stories with new eyes. Some of my stuff is just awful – lousy, script-style writing with lots of actions in between asterisks that are hard on the eyes. But there’s actually some good stuff – some stories I wrote based on Beatles songs, for example, and the origin story of Belle Malone… and you know what? It’s actually good. Better than Stephenie Meyer, and she’s making a killing on lousy writing. (I actually tolerate the Twilight saga, but let’s face it: she’s fanfic-ing it up and getting paid a stupid amount of money to be mediocre.)

So I just thought I’d share and otherwise bare my soul to scrutiny among friends that may not have known about this dirty little net-secret of mine. I haven’t written any stuff like that in like, five years (and that’s five years too close for comfort, really), and I won’t ever write that level of garbage ever again, but it’s still cute. And maybe, if I’m extra brave, I’ll even link you to this horrid collection. If you’re good and mind your manners.