Day 2 of my blog challenge is:
WRITE A FAN FICTION
This is totally uncool because basically the first thing I ever wrote was back in fourth grade and it was fan fiction for my much older brother’s birthday (14 years older, actually) . I thought he liked Star Trek because he once got stuck baby sitting me for a whole weekend and it rained the entire time and so he just sort of plopped me down and made me watch Star Trek, the original series, because he didn’t want to actually have to do stuff with me. I don’t blame him. I was totally annoying. I slurred my s’s and had glasses and was kind of pudgy and totally had this self-righteous hero complex and had never watched a single episode of Star Trek before this.
Anyway, his birthday was coming up and I needed to get him something awesome so he would love me, but I was in fourth grade and had NO INCOME AT ALL, so I thought in this brilliant epiphany moment, “I shall write him a Star Trek story starring a pudgy girl who has glasses and slurs her s’s and has this self-righteous hero complex.”
Image of Awesome Spiral Notebooks from istockimg
So, for the next 10 days or so, I brought all these notebooks and my magic markers out to the woods and instead of looking for Big Foot (my usual pastime), I wrote this story for my brother, in long hand. It ended up being about 423 pages of this girl whose name was Cassie Bartlett (my name was Carrie Barnard) who saves the entire universe, but not before Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy, Sulu, and Spock fall in love with her. Yeah. Even Mr. Spock who is supposed to not have uncontrolled emotions (even though he TOTALLY has uncontrolled emotions for Kirk) falls in love with Cassie Bartlett/Carrie Barnard.
I thought this was pure genius.
I even had her die in the end saving the entire Star Trek universe. Everyone cries. Even Mr. Spock.
But when I gave my notebooks to my super jock, Varsity-letter-in-three-sports brother, he sort of frowned and tried to sound nice and said, “What is this, Squirt?”
He called me Squirt. This was sort of evil.
And I said, “It’s a Star Trek story! I wrote it for you for your birthday! It’s 423 pages and it stars this girl, Cassie Bartlett and she has to — ”
And he said, “I don’t like Star Trek.”
Then everyone had birthday cake and ice cream. Except me. I had a belly ache and went in my room and cried.
Back then, I didn’t know that not everybody is going to like your story. And I didn’t know that sometimes writing your story is way more fun than publishing it. And I didn’t know fanfiction existed or what it was or that I just wrote it. (According to the online Merriam Webster dictionary, fan fiction is: “stories involving popular fictional characters that are written by fans and often posted on the Internet —called alsofan fic.” Now I know! ). And I didn’t know that even if your brother watchesStar Trek with you all weekend, he may not like the actual show, he just might not want to hunt for Big Foot with you in the backyard for 15-hour stretches at a time in the rain because he is cooler than that.
His reaction didn’t stop me from writing forever though. I cried. Okay, I totally cried a lot, but next year in fifth grade I kept winning the Author of the Month contests that we had in Language Arts class. And even later in fourth grade I wrote a lot of really bad poems like: Cassie’s not feeling well today/ Some boy stole her heart away. (For the record, that boy was Jamie Schneiderheinze). And even now, when I get rejected or someone posts a review on Amazon that says Nick in the NEED series is ‘totally not hot,’ (SIDE NOTE: HE TOTALLY IS HOT! DUH), I keep writing.
Why?
I don’t know how to stop really. I don’t know how to not write. I try and I get cranky and feel lost. I try and I act like a vegan at Whole Foods who has only eaten kale all week. You do not want to be near me.
I don’t stop because I am addicted to story, addicted to getting better as a writer, and addicted to making worlds where I can sort of control things, which is so different than my real life that it is kind of silly.
But I think it really comes down to these two things: I write because I think it’s really fun and I write because it’s how I understand the world a teeny bit more. And believe me, I have a really hard time understanding the world.
So, yeah, all that and I haven’t even written the fanfiction that I am supposed to write for this blog entry. Way to stay on task, Carrie, huh?
So here:
Once upon a time, Mr. Spock read Cassie Bartlett’s original fourth-grade fan fiction and cried. Not because he was sad. He cried because he laughed so hard at it. Because of this uncontrollable laughter/sobbing, Mr. Spock had to go to sick bay on the Enterprise and Bones aka Dr. McCoy thought he was having a nervous breakdown. Bones read the manuscript as well and began to laugh so hard that he fell down, bashed into Nurse Chapel and broke his leg and her arm. Cassie Bartlett totally didn’t care. Okay, she did. But she decided in her next fan fiction she would give them the red shirt treatment when they went down on a mission to Planet Squatch and they’d all get eaten by Big Foot because they were meanie heads and Big Foot does not tolerate meanie heads. The end.
*Honestly, that was pretty much on par with the quality of my fourth-grade fan fiction. 
