Back in the day, so long ago it feels like a different lifetime, I wrote short stories- some that were truly just all my own creation, but the vast majority of which were Roswell fan fiction. Which is sort of embarrassing to admit-I mean, fan fiction alone has a bad reputation, but add Roswell in there and it’s sort of like admitting that you’re a complete geek. (I am a complete geek.)
Roswell was a show on the WB, back in the day when the WB had Dawson’s Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its rotation; heck, back when the WB was the WB and not the CW. I was in college when those shows came on the scene, so too old to just swallow the characters whole as potential role models (that role had been filled by 90210 and Saved by the Bell). But young enough to watch them all in a non-ironic way. I fell in love with most of those late 90s dramas-Felicity, Dawson, Buffy being my favorites, Popular and 7th Heaven being the filler.
But Roswell came along at just the right time-I was a sophomore in college, right in the middle of this time in my life when I was reading so many books, learning so many new things, and, most importantly, writing like my life depended on it. Stories came pouring out of me and I had no where to put them. Somehow I stumbled upon a Roswell fan site, looking for spoilers if I remember correctly, and came upon this notion of fan fiction. I had no idea what that was, and it just so happens that I read a couple of really wonderful stories on whatever site that was-fan fiction is a tricky thing, and some of it is retched awful, truly. But in that first blush with it, I found Persephone’s Footfalls, which, in the world of Roswell fan fiction, is like stumbling upon Great Expectations-it is widely acknowledged as the best fan fiction that this tiny show ever offered up to the world.
(Written by Elizabeth, who remains one of my favorite authors of all time despite the fact that I know nothing about her except her name, she wrote the very best of Roswell fan fiction. This particular story was a retelling of the myth of Persephone and Hades using the human character of Maria and the alien character of Michael, and while that could have turned out awful, in her hands it became an exploration of falling in love with the enemy, of what it means to be “other,” and of what it means to be a family. It is one of the best stories I have ever read.)
It didn’t take too terribly long for my writing to find a home in the Roswell world. I loved writing these stories, because the characters were already established, and so I could play with the constructs as much as I wanted to, I could write POV pieces that explored ideas that I needed to play out in my own head-it was an early form of therapy for me. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and was rewarded for these efforts by something of a following in this Roswell world. I loved that-I write so much better than I speak, and this was a way to meet new people and not trip all over my tongue.
And then the bottom fell out. Roswell, you see, had been a tiny show. It was developed by Jason Katims, who had been a writer on My So-Called Life. Initially the show had been promoted as a My So-Called Life with aliens-all of the alien stuff was just sort of a large metaphor for being an outsider. That story telling is what drew me to the show. But because it was a science fiction show, there was a hunger for more special effects and “alien” storylines among a lot of its fans. When it just barely survived cancellation that first season, the writers began to amp up all of the more “out of this world” aspects to the storylines, to the point that the show became almost unrecognizable. With that shift in tone, the fan base for Roswell stories, and particularly the large, angsty teen drama that I liked to write-the fan base just collapsed for that.
It was just at the same time that my stories completely stopped generating any traction that I got engaged. My life shifted away into planning my new, adult life, and writing along with it. Until the blog came along, I didn’t write at all for about nine years.
Sometimes the blog feels the same to me-like sometimes I’m just sending these words out into the void and they don’t really have any life beyond that. But writing is my happy place, my passion, my joy inside of every single day. Words don’t come in the form of stories anymore, and for a long while I beat my head against that and tried to force them, but I have finally made my peace with the fact that they aren’t going to come out in that way any longer.
Words come to me in snippets, in long essays that exist, I know, as still just a form of therapy that sometimes I hope that other people can relate to. That’s all any of this is. But I do cherish having a place to keep my words, a home of my making to hold them and remind me years later of all the changes inside of me in the past eight years that I have been blogging.
So, I’m going to keep right on blogging like it’s 2011, and sending these words out into the void, if only to hear the echo of my own voice.
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