Me? Write something like that?!

For class this week, we were tasked with reading some samples of and ultimately writing a piece of slash fan fiction ourselves.

Now whereas, I think having us author work is a great touch to this course, I'm not exactly sure why we were forced to pick slash as opposed to any other choice. If the idea was to get us to try something new, posting any type of fan fiction would have been a new experience to me, but alas we had to write SLASH fiction (a term that sounds a little disturbing)-- which incorporates a "queering" (to whatever degree) of established characters.

According to Michel de Certeau (in Jenkins' accounting of "Textual Poachers"), there is an "ongoing struggle for possession of the text and for control over its meanings." The struggle is between the textual producers, "instituionally sanctioned interpreters" and those "multiple voices of fandom, who produce and share meanings from their own perspectives.

This exercise was to get us to participate in this struggle over text and possibly to get us to identify more closely to the "fandom" that wishes to not sit passively with a text, but to become active participants in the creativity surrounding that text.

I think writers of slash fan fiction have a reason or at least an inner desire to do it, but I'm just doing it because of this class assignment. It doesn't feel comfortable to me as I don't like altering others' characters. So to make this easier, I decided to choose characters from "This is Spinal Tap," as I think the "queering" idea already exists within the original story.

So, I came up with the beginning of what could become a longer piece, but due to time constraints and other commitments (and most importantly, becuase I didn't think it was necessary), I've stopped at two pages. Approaching this with some scriptwriting experience, I think it reads more like a script (without the proper formatting) and I'm not really a fiction writer in the long-form prose sense.

I think what I found to be even odder than writing and posting this piece was that within 24 hours, I had received a comment from someone saying they were looking forward to the next installment.

I feel really strange.