I read Fighting Gravity on ao3 earlier this year and I wanted to tell you I loved it! I'm one of those peripheral members of fandoms who haven't read or watched any of the canon stuff, but are too obsessed with the fanworks to stop. It makes me wonder about stories like yours - is some point in the larger canon where something similar happens, or do you just come up with the idea for an unhoused Spock on your own?
I'm sending my ask to thank your for your story, but I also wanted to ask if you were alright with people printing and binding personal copies (ie. not for profit) of the fic for themselves.
I've been hand binding sketchbooks on and off for a little while, and I saw a tiktok of someone's self-bound versions of their favourite fics and thought that trying my hand at fic binding would be a fun project for this summer.
I just wanted to ask bc I heard some authors aren't okay with personal prints, so just let me know please; I'll always love the story regardless.
Aw, thank you so much! I'm sorry it took so long for me to reply - my laptop completely died several months back and the only one I could get online with is 11 years old, freezes up upon trying to load Tumblr, and is physically falling apart. -_- So I have been away from Tumblr all this time and did not see this until I got a new laptop tonight and could load the site again, I apologize!
First of all - I consider it a great honor when anyone thinks enough of my fanstuff to want to do ANYTHING with it. =) I mean, I'm just out here being a nerd, writing fic about characters that are not mine. I can hardly be possessive about them. ;) So while I suppose it's rather late for a summer project, if for some reason the inclination strikes you in the future, feel free! It sounds like a beautiful project and I'm honestly flattered that you would think my story worthy. =)
As for the inspiration behind that particular story... there is a rather silly story behind it. (tl;dr, possibly...)
My partner-at-the-time and I were both really into the new Star Trek movie when it came out in 2009 - and this was not long after both of us were fixated on Ace Attorney fandom, which had recently had a new game released. Before the game was released, there was some character art showing an existing character looking scruffy, and the Ace Attorney fandom decided he must have fallen on hard times. There were multiple fanfics written about the guy he's usually shipped with finding him unhoused and taking him in and helping him get back on his feet. It became sort of a fandom injoke, "Miles adopts a homeless Phoenix".
Not long after the first reboot Star Trek movie came out, the ONTD Star Trek community over at LiveJournal (good times!) dug up some screen test pics of Zachary Quinto wearing the Spock ears... but with a scruffy unshaven look and longer hair. So I showed them to my partner, who reacted with six little words:
"So... Jim adopts a homeless Vulcan?"
I laughed because that was ridiculous and impossible given how some things work in the Star Trek canon. ...And then I started thinking about it, and how maybe it wasn't impossible, how someone *could* possibly wind up in such a situation in the Star Trek universe, and stopped laughing. ...And then spent the next several months of my life having this offhand joking comment turn into yet another exploration of one of my favorite themes: predestination vs. free will. OOPS.
My partner, of course, was laughing their head off incredulously the whole time as I sent them drafts of the next chapter to read over and repeatedly reminded them that this was ALL THEIR FAULT. ;)
So that is the...origin story... of that fic. Apologies for the length of this (and again, the lateness of the reply) - though to be honest it's so absurd it's fun to share it again. :D
