Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
Fans can be the worst – and the best. On the one hand, fans can be gatekeepers, they can be reactionary and bring out the worst in a franchise. On the other, fans can be welcoming and giving and creative. Last week, Melanie wrote about the joy to be found in fan translations. This week, I’m asking you to indulge me in a trip down Memory Lane, to my own experiences writing fanfic.
The thing is, at the time I wasn’t aware that I was writing fanfic. In fact, I’m not sure I even knew what fanfic was. This is back in 1994, and while I had visited the internet, it was just once or twice, before university, where I had free access to this brave new world of newsgroups and GeoCities and online diaries (which later turned into weblogs, which then became known as blogs). I was a fan, though – of sci-fi and fantasy, and in particular of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I was in my late teens, and while I had grown up with reruns of the original Star Trek series, I only really became a fan once it was the turn of Captain Picard, Commander Riker, Data and the crew of the NCC-1701-D, a new USS Enterprise for a new generation of spacebound exporers. (Mind you, I always preferred the O.G. Enterprise and its various iterations to its 24th century counterpart, but that’s a different conversation, and I’m not nearly enough of a fan at this point to want to engage in it.)
Pre-internet also means pre-streaming, and it wasn’t easy to watch Star Trek at the time: they showed The Next Generation on German TV, but in a dubbed version, and who’d want to watch Patrick Stewart dubbed into German, or any other language, for that matter? More than that, you have not experienced technobabble until you have heard it in the original English, and in the German dub it was impossible to ignore how silly the jargon got at times. Thanks to my mother being both a Brit and an early adopter type, we eventually got a satellite dish and a TV decoder – and that meant we got Sky Channel, later Sky One, and access to lots and lots of new series and films that otherwise we would have had to wait for.
Finally I was able to enjoy Captain Jean-Luc Picard, staunch Frenchman, speaking the way he was meant to be: in crisp, authoritative stage English fit for the Royal Shakespeare Company. And as I watched season after another of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I became a Trekkie. Or Trekker. Not having access to the internet, I didn’t even know what we were supposed to call ourselves – but that didn’t matter, because, Switzerland not being big on sci-fi or fantasy at the time, I was the only person I knew at the time who was a fan of TNG anyway.
Except: you’re never really alone if you’ve got a local bookshop with a small but well-stocked sci-fi corner, which is where I found out about the official Star Trek novels published by Simon & Schuster. These weren’t always great, but let’s be honest: neither was every single episode of Star Trek. What they mainly were, was more stories with these characters I wanted to hang out with. But, eventually, reading about the crew of the USS Enterprise wasn’t enough: I found that I wanted to tell such stories myself… so I started writing my own Star Trek novel.
Or was it fanfic? Not being aware of the universe of writing fans were doing about their favourite characters, and definitely not being aware of the weird and wonderful world of slash fiction (in my beige, heteronormative teen mind, Kirk and Spock were good friends and that was all they were), I just saw myself as writing a novel, much like the ones I’d been reading. Page by page, my Word document grew, and I found that writing, particularly in this world I knew so well from hundreds of hours of TV, came relatively easy. And before long, I had finished it.
If I had been online at the time, and if I’d known about fanfic, I might’ve just shared my story with other fans. Alas, I hadn’t and I didn’t – so I did what so many fledgling writers do: I looked for an agent. (It is quite possible that I used one of my one or two jaunts into the online world to do so, though by now it’s been such a long time I don’t really remember the details.) And I found one, a literary agent suited to first-time authors, based in New York. Or New Jersey. Or New Brunswick, for all I knew. What I didn’t know – and again, this is where the internet might have helped me – was that there were so many literary agents, or rather “literary agents”, who specialised in first-time authors because these were easiest to scam. I also didn’t know that it wasn’t an altogether good sign to have an agent heap high praises on my writing and play up its sellability – and then to ask me for an amount that, at the time and at the age I was, wasn’t inconsiderable. I thought that this was simply what all writers had to go through on the road to fame, fortune and seeing your name on the cover of a Star Trek novel.
The rest of the story isn’t particularly interesting: I continued writing, later adding a Deep Space Nine novel and a Voyager script to my resume (and I didn’t even like Voyager!), none of which ever went much further than my hard disk once I’d sent them to that pretend literary agent. I realised that this agent might obtain the occasional rejection letter for me to make it look like they were legit, but other than that I couldn’t expect anything other than them holding out their hand for more free cash. After all, what’s a nerd from Switzerland in his late teens and a couple of Star Trek manuscripts in his Documents folder other than a cash cow, albeit a modest one? Moo no more, I say.
In hindsight, I look at that experience as a moderately funny cautionary tale: don’t trust a literary agent that wants money from you before they do any work themselves, much like you wouldn’t trust anyone who claims to be the director of a Nigerian company wanting to transfer several million dollars to your bank account. As I find out now, Wikipedia even has a term for it: it’s called an “advance-fee scam”, and that was exactly what it was.
I continued writing after this experience, though not in the genres of sci-fi or fanfic (because that’s really what it was – I was just years too early to know it). I even co-taught a couple of Creative Writing courses at Uni. Once I left university and started working regular jobs, I sadly stopped, mainly because I lacked the time or energy or discipline (or a combination of all three) to sit down and write after a day at the office. I still like to spin a yarn, and it’s not like I draw a clear, sharp line between writing fiction and writing for A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, as there’s an element of storytelling in most writing. But I miss those early days, I miss coming up with stories on a regular basis, and I’m hoping that I’ll eventually get back to it.
This time, though, I’ll try to do it without falling for a scam literary agent. As with most rites of passage, one time is certainly enough. More than. As Captain Picard might say in his crisp Shakespearean voice: j’emmerde tout ça.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 
Star Trek! A major classic! Loved the imagination!