Once upon a time in fandom

[neadods]

Once upon a time, when the world was younger and I was younger still, the only way to get fanfiction that you hadn't written yourself was to buy a zine, and the only way to buy a zine was to go to conventions.

And THE convention for zines, no matter what your fandom was, was Media*West. I'd save every penny I had - at $20 a pop, the money went fast. (That's why it was more than an ego rush to get published yourself. It was one less copy to have to buy!) And the zines went even faster - back in the very early days, when many of the zines still smelled of corflu and the accepted practice was to print all the copies up front on spec - print runs were small and zines could sell out on Thursday night before the con even opened. (Then fandom got savvier but print runs got even smaller, because things went to print on demand and it was even harder to get copies.)

boogiebabe_smap and I would take zerox boxes and try to fill them up with what we found in the dealer's room and the hall crawl and our comp copies, and no matter how many I got, I'd read all through them before the end of June and couldn't imagine how I'd wait until next Memorial Day for my fix.

I often get nostalgic about the way fandom was right before Media*West. I'm finding myself particularly nostalgic this year.

This year, when I'm not driving to Michigan for the first time in over 20 years.

This year... when I'm boxing up all the old zines and putting them in the basement. Oh, I'm not getting rid of them. Whoever executes my will is going to have to figure out what to do with all those old Real Ghostbuster and KF-TLC zines, not to mention the pile of Beauty and the Beast ones that's double my not-insignificant body weight.

But I'm doing a lot of cleaning and a lot of pruning, and the brutal truth is, I haven't read fanfiction on paper in almost a decade now. These days the question isn't "how do I find shelf space for the new zines?" it's "how do I get fanfic from the internet onto my ipod touch?"

Comments

[fyrdrakken]

My first fandom was a flavor of Star Trek, so there were indeed zines (though not many) and I went to MW*C to meet up with some fellow fans, and I bought some zines (at MW*C but mostly online) and was kind of suprised and disappointed a few fandoms later when no one did zines at all.

Though that was before I'd really gotten to grips with the essential truth of my own fannish involvement -- that I obsess for a few years and then move on and don't really involve myself with the prior fandoms anymore. (I mean, I'll watch the new canon as it comes along, but the real love is gone and I'm just not invested in it anymore.) And digital media I can save for years, no problem, but zines take up space -- and I'm not likely to ever read them again, so. (Still got a few zines over at my grandmother's house. When I have to clear all of my own stuff out of there, I think I'll hang on to the one or two I got contributor's copies of and trash the rest.)

A week or three back someone was polling on fannish reading habits and I found myself thinking out loud regarding her question about fannish vs. non-fannish reading and print vs. online reading: I like reading books and can't make myself finish reading e-books (no Kindle for me), I like reading fanfic (even unto novel-length) and happily reread even long favorites but never print them out and don't really care to have zines taking up shelf space. There's some weird mental thing going on there that expects pro fic to be printed and bound but fanfic to be digital.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

There's some weird mental thing going on there that expects pro fic to be printed and bound but fanfic to be digital.

I've swung back the other way after losing a lot of my 10K fanfic in the palm pilot crash.

[fyrdrakken]

I get paranoid about backups -- every Sunday night the reminders pop up on my Blackberry to back up the PDA and desktop (and added bonus of keeping the external hard drive up-to-date with the desktop, that when I go out of town I have all my files without having to keep them on the laptop/netbook and clog the memory, the way I used to). I should really worry more about my thumb drives, though -- too many things on there that I don't have copied off anywhere else. Need to be more pro-active about clearing off the one I use on a daily basis, and deal with the files left on the three I don't generally use.