I’m really doing the timewarp today... Snapple Elements are back on shelves, so after scaring the shit out of the guy stocking the shelves at Publix, (seriously... I screamed with joy) I’m sipping a Fire and revisiting fanfic I wrote in 2002. It’s been interesting reading that fic for the first time in two decades. There’s some stuff that makes me want to slightly die inside, but I’m finding those same things really interesting and informative. I can tell that I knew what kind of writer I wanted to be... Just not how best to execute it. And it’s a Mary Sue, sort of... so I’m very much present on the page.
As a highly sheltered 16 year old from a hyper conservative Christian family, with very little internet access and living in a small city in the Deep South, I had some... issues. While I was clearly not having any truck with the rigors of conservative beliefs, you can still see the tangles of puritanical ideology that I’m trying to extricate myself from. I clearly felt the only way to be free from those ideas was to antagonistically challenge them. If they’re going to say you’re terrible, then the best revenge is to be what they say you are... be a slut. Be a whore. Be dirty or monstrous or whatever. It was a long time... hell almost 20 years I guess, before I realized that it didn’t have to be that way. I’m looking forward to publishing the fic again... and I’m going to post the rewritten version as well as the original. It’s been helpful to me to see the difference. To see how far I’ve come. To see what I looked like in the midst of the fray as I fought like hell to figure out who I was with nothing but negative space to give me any sort of shape. Maybe that comparison might help someone else. That’s the whole point of art after all. So yeah. Matrix fic and Snapple Fire... twenty years on. I think 16 year old me would be pretty proud.