Looking Back: Co-Writing A Lot Of Fan Fiction

So if your follow me on twitter you'll notice I do follow people who write mature-rated fan fiction, some of them are folks I've come to know and others are people who I'm big fans of, so there is a reason for that. Way back around this time in 2004, I got heavily involved with writing fan fiction based on on the world of pro wrestling by giving a bit of feed back on a piece co-written by writer name Kristi, and that kicked off over a decade of writing for us, where we covered every possible scenario we can think off based off of WWE story lines, gimmicks and characters. Now most of our work was on the now defunct WOWEFA, but just about everything was more posted in a Yahoo group's file section that has since been removed thanks to the Yahoo / Verizon not finding Groups worth keeping around these days.

Being critical as I look back at well over 2000 pieces of fan fiction, I can say we certainly had a tendency to letting series run too long, and proofreading was really neither of our strengths. Our characterization and just general formulaic approach really made things weird when we put together larger projects... and without question, a lot of the things we wrote didn't age well. I know I had and still have a real lack of variety of putting words together in forming a sentence, so when I look back at just things I know I did I just want to proverbial bang my head against wall. Still that comes with the territory when one looks back at one's own work and just cringe while wondering if something could've been written better.  Hell we probably would've been better served if we did more than just focus on pro-wrestling, but we never could connect on other pop culture realms.

But the important think is we had a lot of fun along the way. Sure we had our creative differences. arguments cause we both had real strong opinions as it came to our fandom, but I think more often than not, things were positive. Hell we had nights where we'd write from like 7 PM EST to like 4 AM EST, and we wrote damn near every day, only taking nights off for Sunday pay-per-views. It was rare we didn't at least chat once a day to go over an idea, put together a rough outline or look up details of dates, venues, match cards to make sure things fit a timeline. We put a lot of effort into everything we did, with nearly every one-shot story being at least 5 pages, and we had somethings going well beyond 100 pages. It was a huge amount of personal time invested on both of our parts.

Which is why every now and then I consider going through and finding away to preserve anything since that was a huge part of my life, maybe upload everything to Archive of Our Own, but to get everything in the correct format, not to mention trying to clean up typos, double spacing and fixing wrapped text issues would take a long time, and I have been put off by investing that much of my time doing that. Plus, there are a lot more talented people writing fan fiction of his sort these days that it would feel weird putting things out there from 16 years ago.

And it's why this time of year always makes me remember fondly, and I do keep in touch with Kristi on occasion, but this is probably the first time outside of the fan fiction writing community I've straight up talked about it in any regards. I enjoyed writing and I met some great folks along the way thanks to it.