On Thursday night my wife fired up her netbook and surfed over to my blog and read the title of the post and said "Fanfic again, huh?" All I could do was smile sweetly and say "What part of 'fanfic WEEK' did you think I was joking about?"
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But I missed yesterday, and the reason is because I spent the vast majority of it (when not toddler-wrangling which I assume almost goes without saying) tidying up the house because we have a guest coming to town today and spending the night tonight. That might seem like mere excuse-making but it is actually relevant insomuch as this friend is one of the people I mentioned during the course of the week - a fellow fanficcer who I now consider a friend, despite only ever communicating via e-mail and reading one another's stories. There are odder things in this modern age to base a friendship on besides the common ground of being copyright scofflaws. Anyway, my online acquaintance lives on the west coast but came east for Thanksgiving and I suggested we get together, so he's riding the bus down from NYC to DC today and will spend the night on our sleeper sofa before heading back tomorrow morning. We both tend to write fairly locquacious e-mails so I suspect there's a strong chance we'll both just chatter dorkily most of the night and I'll be hoarse tomorrow. Fun stuff.
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Speaking of fun stuff, like the much anticipated (in this quarter) Green Lantern movie, they released the first full trailer online this week and you may be wondering if I saw it. I didn't interrupt Fanfic Week to talk about it but OF COURSE I SAW IT. Actually that's not as much of a gimme as you might think because I tend to get most of my online time in logged while I'm at work, but I don't have speakers at my work computer so one area I fall behind in is online videos. But I made a special point of clicking over to the trailer at home on Tuesday evening. And I realized, strangely, that although I was curious to see the trailer I might have let it go a couple of weeks nevertheless. It wasn't so much pure desire to see it that drove me, as it happened, but a desire to meet other people's expectations - I assumed other people who know me would ask me what I thought of it and I wanted to be ready. Then of course I got together with my friends on Wednesday evening and none of them asked about it at all. Such is always the way.
But bottom line, the trailer has not diminished my enthusiasm for the movie. It looks keen, and also seems to have a good sense of humor about itself. Come on, Summer '11!
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One last thought about fanfic, specifically the research part, which I avoided the temptation to tangent into earlier: yet another reason why the internet so strongly enabled fanfic as part of the 90’s web ascendance goes something like this: fan sites devoted simply to chronicling every line of dialogue and every plot development for various cult tv shows and sci-fi movies and whatnot make great resources for determining the correct backstory for fanfic writers to draw upon in fleshing out their own ideas, and the fact that those fan sites were online put them at everyone’s fingertips. Not to mention that if you want to include more exotic, pulpy elements in your stories, be it the inside of a nuclear missile silo as a setting or poisonous spiders as murder weapons or whatever, the vast resources of teh interwebs make that info easy to find, too. Anyone who might have fought the urge to contribute their own ideas to semi-official canon because they lacked confidence in their own expertise pretty much couldn't use that excuse one the information age really boomed.
Also incidentally, sometimes I think I should start my own comic book reference site collecting all the information I was never able to find easily online when doing my own fanfic research. That's ideally how the internet Web 2.whatever is supposed to work - everyone contributes and the whole ends up greater and all that. I do have a scanner now, after all. It's probably only lack of time that holds me back. If I make it that far, I'm going to be the least bored retired person EVER.
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