On the other hand, editors also have to apply various things like 'schedules' and 'line limits' and 'word counts', which may or may not be the same as whatever schedules, line limits and word counts they quoted to the writer.
On the other hand, as the postman told me, "You can't complain at *all*." He's right. I can't. So I'll just stop now.
Regardless, I now have two articles in the local entertainment paper, one on comics and one on anime. I just wish there would be some sort of proper scheduling on this. I turn articles in, I wait. Sometimes they appear the very next week, sometimes they're sat on for a while. Sometimes they put two of my articles in the same issue. My god, they must be mad! You have to build up a tolerance for Jesse before you can take such massive exposures all at once!
Now if only I could write something to appear in the real paper.
At one time, I was a fiction writer.
Specifically, of the science fantasy sort, which is the category that fun things like Space Opera and Super-Heroics fall into, depending on who you talk to. Categorizing fiction is something that has been known to inspire bloody battles to the death among afficionadoes everywhere. So, with this conflict raging in the background, providing a lovely chorus of screams and howls of pain and rage to emphacize the wonderful subject matter, we will now embark upon...
Drumroll, please...
Jesse's History As A Writer.
Thank you, thank you.
We now wait a moment for several people to flee the theatre in terror of such a terrible subject. Here's some viola music while we wait.
[Viola music.]
Right, those of you who're still with us...
It was a lawless period. A time of chaos, but nice chaos, when the Internet was still boiling forth in the first throes of expansion. Before the First Great Spammers began to plague the landscape (I still remember the first time that scourge came to my attention. Canter and Seigel, wasn't it? Article in the paper about them, saying spam was the Next Big Thing. Should have saved it. But that's another story.). It was a glorious time, into which I stumbled, cheerful and perky and as-yet still naive. And... Well, I suppose I should go back even farther than that.
In the beginning, there was the BBS. The Bulletin Board System (or was it Service). Oh, those ancient, halcyon days. When dialing in from home meant using a Dumb Terminal and a 2400 baud modem. A dumb terminal! A bloody monitor and a keyboard, with no processing ability whatsoever! And we liked it, by gosh! Anyway, before the 'Internet', I mostly used this to dial in to my father's VAX/VMS system and play 'Empire'. There's a lesson there, perhaps. Anyway, somehow, I discovered BBSing. BBSes were basically PC systems (A PC! What wonders, this!) running the 'World War IV' system, providing chat and games a-plenty. Ah, the chat! The promise of interaction with other surly teenagers all over! Ah, the games, those wonders of wonders like 'Trade Wars' and... and... um, there were others, I just don't remember them. One of my favorites was a post-apocalyptic one where you wandered around, fought monsters (via the fascinating method of timing and reflexes of having a list of numbers seperated by periods scroll across the bottom of the screen, and you had to check which number was your 'target', and hit the space bar as close to it as you could. This, shockingly, took a LOT of practice.), and, as in most of the games I liked, built and equipped bases with your proceeds. It's not a real game unless you can create your own strongholds and places of power, slowly building them up until they are impregnible fortresses, places to rest, heal, recouperate in between slaughtering mutant hordes.
One day, my ever-seeking little mind discovered the wonders of BBS text info files. One of these was a list of BBSes.
One of those was a test 'BBS' run off of a Unix (or was it Sun) system at the University of North Carolina, providing free email accounts to all comers. Remember that? When free email accounts were, well, safe? When people didn't abuse them to send spam and other crapola to people? Ah, those were the days. Regardless, it was sort of a 'test system', probably run by the CS people to give the students experience with maintaining a working, multi user system. And if they accidentally detonated it, hey, it's free, the users have no complaints.
But this BBS was connected to the Internet. Email, at last. And, more importantly, Newsgroups.
Mmm. Newsgroups.
It took forever to seek through those vast lists for interesting 'groups. But, RPG enthusiast that I was, and Shadowrun (a cyberpunkish sort of game involving magic and Gibsonesque stuff) being popular at the time, I eventually stumbled upon the cyberpunk groups. And, then, alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo. This was one of the many 'free writing' groups at the time, where people would just write up stories (which might or might not be based around the 'Chatsubo', a cyberpunk bar in a generic sort of cyberpunk world) and might or might not be connected to other stories on the same group. And might or might not suck. But this, to me, was rather keen. Here were stories. For free. Fascinated, I jumped right in, neophyte though I was. Yes, I was a teenaged fanboy.
I believe I got through two 'episodes' before something cooler caught my eye (a.c.chatsubo fiction, like most internet stuff, had to be broken into bite-sized chunks to make it easier to propogate. This led to the adoption of the 'serial' form, where the story was designed to be broken into neat little 'episodes', 'issues' or 'chapters', and posted either as they were finished by the writer, or written all at once and released on a schedule, or, for that matter, dumped wholesale in one big flood, depending on the writer's mood. Like most things on the Internet, it began because that's the way you needed to do it to get things distributed, and eventually turned into people using the convention to its best advantage. It also, however, led to people posting one or two pieces as they were completed and then wandering off. A group which included me, apparently. Oops.) Damn that was a long digression. Anyway, the thing that caught my eye was a story by Larry Mann. I don't even remember which one. It was something to do with the Dirty Pair (I'll get to them in a minute), and it probably involved cyberpunk, which was why it was crossposted from the anime groups in the first place.
This caught my eye because 1) Larry Mann could actually write, and, 2) What the hell was this Anime thing, anyway?
The Dirty Pair themselves were also fairly interesting, as scantily clad secret agents go. 'Trouble Consultants' for the Worlds Welfare Works Association (3WA), they traveled the galaxy righting wrongs, and causing havoc that was never, ever, really their fault. Action and comedy! What more could you want?
At this, two things happened. First, I dropped cyberpunk like a rotted lemming carcass and fastened myself firmly onto the anime groups. Secondly, I determined to figure out what this anime thing was, once and for all. This involved the purchase of a bootleg copy of 'Bubblegum Crash', and renting 'Akira', both of which warped my fragile leetle miiiind. I still have the bootleg of 'Bubblegum Crash' as a sort of memento. It also involved seeking out comics for the first time, to acquire the Dirty Pair's appearances in American comicia. It also involved tracking down every other anime story posted to the anime groups (or, rather, group, in those days of low traffic and high content). Including Undocumented Features.
Woe spread across the world as I first paged through that epic tale for the first time. Self-insertion fiction on a grand scale! (Self-insertion fiction is a style which involves shamelessly putting the authors into the story. It's also somewhat of a pejorative.) Anime characters coming to life on a college campus! Worchester, Mass. disappearing in an atomic fireball! Wackiness! Naturally, I did the only thing a red-blooded budding American author could do, when faced with such a sublime work.
I parodied it.
Few records survive of those early days, at least few that anyone would admit to. Much parodying was done, eventually becoming a vast morass o' parody that would span the entire four-volume saga of Undocumented Features, and become, in the words of those few cursed to read this abomination, 'even more pretentious than the original'. This, to some degree, would cure my level of pretentiousness, and never again would I aspire to such heights of stupidity. At least, not unintentionally.
No copies survive of this original work, at least none that anyone would admit to. I mean, who wants to think about pretentious high schoolers? At least the first few chapters of the first bit were funny...
It also, like Undocumented Features, inspired the people who read it to write their own additions. Several of them. No copies of THESE exist, either, at least none that anyone will admit to. I wonder what it is about the epic form that inspires people to jump right in?
At least I'm not the only one who does this. Mario DiGiacomo also did a riff on Undocumented Features. Doubtless there have been others, as well, who at least had the common decency not to post their riffs to the Internet.
This absorbed my writing energies for a while (as did a play-by-email game set in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons world of the Forgotten Realms, and which involved a vast amount of writing on my part and on the part of the players. I really, really wish I'd kept better records of it, some of that stuff was actually pretty good, if still a bit pretentious. (How can you play AD&D and NOT be pretentious, at least a little bit so. Although the drunkard mage with his Ever-Full Flask of Cheap Booze did a lot to leaven things with humour. "Oh, no, not the magic missile again!! I'm ducking for cover! I'm ducking for cover!!" "I swear, I'm going to steal that stupid flask one of these..." "Don't. Do you really want to know what he'd be like sober?") (It eventually faded when the stress of directed writing became way too much for my meagre inspiration and time. Still, it lasted for at least six months, much longer than my next two attempts at play by email gaming, which, at least, finally gave me a clue.)
But eventually, I sought new horizons. My discoveries of the wonders of email had progressed apace, and I had discovered listservs, the mailing lists of yore, via the simple and direct method of managing to subscribe to all of them. All of them. Every single bloody one.
After a desperate flurry of unsubscribing, I perused what remained. One of these was 'Superguy', a superhero fiction mailing list, which worked exactly like the free writing newsgroups, except it was a bit more personable. There was a newsgroup for that sort of thing, too, a different group called 'alt.comics.lnh', which would eventually become rec.arts.comics.creative. Just imagine how my life would have been different if I'd discovered LNH (the Legion of Net Heroes). As you'll discover, quite different, it would have been. Hmm, talking like Yoda I am.
Anyway, I burst happily upon the Superguy scene and, perhaps due to the laid-backedness of the group, or, more likely, due to the fact that they were all away on summer vacation, nobody pointed out the fact that I was still, at this point in my life, a complete idiot. What a nice bunch of people. Or, rather, guys, as they were pretty much all of the guy persuasion.
Ah, those early tales, somewhere between space opera and superhero fiction, yet bobbing happily in the utterly baffled medium in between. The shameless rip-offs, the crude humor, the confused plotting... What glory, this? What beauty? To write something solely for the joy of writing it, and be treated by people who were not only older, but actually better, as, if not an equal, at least someone who should be tolerated, occasionally encouraged, and only rarely noogied.
It eventually turned out that I'd popped in during the 'Great Gap' between the Old Farts, people like John Bankert, Gary Olson and Eric Burns, all of whom have journals but don't seem to ever talk about Superguy much, and who had, back then, been around fairly close to the thing's inception, and the Young Whippersnappers, who began wandering in about a year after me, people like Chris Meadows, Daniel Pawtowski (my god, did I actually spell his name right?) and Lawrence Brown. The Young Whippersnappers, of course, were then followed by the New Wave, people like Chris Angelini and Roger Christman and Amy Borden and Gina (who has a journal as well, which I'm also not going to link to, so nyah). But anyway, I churned happily away on my own little corner of the Superguy Multiverse, perfectly content with my place as an apprentice, of sorts. Because I really *was*. I was a shameless fanboy, a hack plotter, and couldn't come up with good names to save my life. But I was getting better every time I wrote, and I wrote a lot.
It was easier collaborating with the Young Whippersnappers than the Old Farts, because they were, well, also newbies. It was with them that the great tag-team crossover (or combination of multiple stories into a strange and confusing pate') was born, the 'Battle of Springfield', as well as a later story involving Bob City, which tweaked the whiskers of one of the Old Farts, Rob Furr (who ALSO has a journal, and also never speaks of such sordid events), and which took me several years to comprehend just how stupid it must have looked to someone who wasn't up on the concept of giant robot battles, and who must have considered the fact that they didn't mix very well with Film Noir.
Still, I was happy. I had 'cred', I had multiple on-going story-lines, I'd discovered IRC (Internet Relay Chat) as had several of the other Superguy authors and readers, making connections and, if not friendships, at least close, cordial associations.
In short, everything was pretty damn near as good as you could ask for.
Predictably, it then proceeded to go all to shit.
Tomorrow: The Sordid Tale Of How It All Went To Shit, or, The Truth Will Out.
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