What was your high school experience?

[yourlibrarian]

As part of my effort to clear stuff out of the house, I came across my old yearbooks. (BTW, if anyone has any recommendations of places that will buy or take yearbooks, please let me know. I just want them anywhere not here without having to pay for postage). As I hadn't looked at them in quite some time, I browsed through them to see what condition they were in and ended up reading a bunch of messages across different years. I noticed a lot of people referenced the fact that I was writing stories in class.

These were mostly fanfic although I did draft an original novel at the time too as well as various short stories. (These efforts were almost uniformly terrible). The point being that while people did in fact know I was fannish about different things (which was mentioned by a few) they didn't know about fanworks or about it being part of the fan experience. If they remembered anything about me, it would be that I was going to write for a living (even though I never said any such thing to anyone).

I'm curious what experience other people had and whether they'd likely be remembered as a fan by classmates and why?

Comments

[isis]

I guess I was an adult-onset fan. I went to SFF conventions while in college, but I didn't know of the existence of fanfic or feel fannish in the sense I do now until, um, age 39.

[yourlibrarian]

Was it mostly being online that brought you into it?

[isis]

In the sense that being online connected me to those communities, it was certainly a contributor. But I was online during the 90s and not fannish; I was on Usenet but never looked at the, oh, rec.arts.sf.fandom or similar groups. (Pretty much all my participation was in the rec groups for more mainstream hobbies of mine, like rec.food.cooking and rec.bicycling, plus the sci. groups for my job-type interests, and talk.bizarre for silliness.)

I was traveling for three years and out of touch from mainstream media (as well as not having regular online access) and returned to the US just as the second Harry Potter movie was released. My sister-in-law, a children's librarian, recommended it, so I rented the first movie, watched the second in the theater, then went to the library and got all four (at the time) books and devoured them. Then I went online to see if I could find anything else relevant...and I discovered Fuh-Q-Fests and the veela-inc mailing list. :-) That was the beginning of my long descent into fandom....

[yourlibrarian]

It can be tough to be connected to fandom when one's schedule is irregular or one's immersed in other things. I expect that part of it is that it takes time to explore and find out who and what is out there, or keep up with developments, which is tough to do when it can't be done with any regularity.

But it can also just take that one source that really hooks you :)