Well. I brought it up. I may as well finish the thought.
Fanfic.
I have been writing it, in one form or another, since approximately 1978, when I was a child watching Battlestar Galactica and became so personally offended by what the scriptwriters had done to my favourite characters that I sat down and fixed it myself. In a notebook. Because I was a child in 1978 and that was the technology available. I had absolutely no idea it was a thing people did, that it had a name, that there were others out there quietly rewriting television shows in their bedrooms because the professionals had gotten it catastrophically wrong. I thought I’d invented it. I was extremely pleased with myself.
Fast forward to 1996, and I was deep in it — still not quite knowing the shape of the world I was swimming in. Then 1998 arrived and suddenly I did know, and my head promptly filled to the brim with new plots for The Young Riders and Magnificent Seven. Cowboys were, and honestly still are, quite the thing for me. I’m still working out which of my four personas is going to write cowboys. It’s an open question. They’re all looking at each other.
Magnificent Seven is also, not incidentally, where Karen and I found each other — milling around in RPGs and fanfic, testing our writing against each other’s, discovering that we were doing something similar and that it worked better together than apart. We’ve been finishing each other’s sentences ever since, across however many thousands of miles of ocean currently separate rural Tasmania from Portland, Oregon.
Then in 2010 CBS made Hawaii Five-0 and I had an entirely new pond to play in. If you ever want to ask me about the crossover fic I wrote featuring vampires and every single character Alex O’Loughlin had ever played, all in the one story — ask. I will tell you. It was ambitious. It was possibly unhinged. I regret nothing.
Fast forward again to 2025, and I was desperate to write 9-1-1 fanfic. Keen as anything. It just wouldn’t come. Something about the format, the constraints, the box of it — it never quite worked for me, no matter how hard I pushed. But taking those characters and putting them somewhere entirely new? Whole different story. Completely different experience. I was on that like a seagull on a hot chip.
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