Lois & Clark Nfic Archive Interview with Laurie Farber

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Lois & Clark Nfic Archive Interview with Laurie Farber (Larus)
Interviewer:
Interviewee:	Laurie Farber
Date(s):	early 2000s
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
External Links:	Lois & Clark, Archived version
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Laurie Farber was interviewed for the Lois & Clark Nfic Archive.

See that site for others in this series.

The introduction:

This week’s interviewee is one of the longest-standing FoLCs around, and a tremendous fan of fanfic, as long as it’s LONG stories. She’s a fantastic nagger - er, *encourager* of writers who produce longer stories. She’s also been a General Editor for the Fanfic Archive for a few years, as well as an occasional beta-reader, which is her way of giving something back to the writers who give her reading pleasure.

Some Excerpts

When did you first discover fanfic? I can't remember exactly when. I know I deliberately searched for an online fandom and found it on AOL. There were message boards dominated by a lot of silly teenagers and Zoomway who always set them right <g>. I shortly started skimming to just see what Zoomway was saying. Somewhere in there I found a way to sign up for fanfic. I remember Leigh Raglan's compendiums and Rhen's fanfic list. This was definitely well into the series, but long before it ended.

What's the very first fanfic you read? Do you remember what your first thoughts were about the concept of fanfiction? I don't remember the first one. I know Debby's Dawning was very early on. She had a note at the end about only continuing if readers were interested. I wrote to her. We became friends and I almost immediately started to BR for her. She'd send me printouts (this was in the days of very slow modems and paying by the hour online) and I'd mark them up with a red pencil and send them back. (According to the archive, Dawning 2 was finished in January 1995.) I also remember writing to Zoomway after reading one of her stories, mentioning the differences between 'peak' and 'pique.' I think I BR for one of her stories after that, too.

Meeting folcs has always been an adventure, too. Debby was always wonderful in the early days of folcdom for forwarding on the interesting messages from the loiscla listserv to those of us that just couldn't handle that volume of mail. That's how I found out that Leigh Raglan lived in NYC and was trying to get together a group of folcs. It was a strange gathering at a very strange place. Because I wasn't an active member of the listserv, I didn't really know anyone. Leigh was disappointed afterwards that people didn't keep in touch--but I never really learned who those people were. The next gathering was taken over by a young gal named Gina and that was much more fun. Through Gina, I later met some other adult folcs all on AOL at the time and we even went out to CA together (Debby had joined our little group by that time, too). We saw the streets of Metropolis and Smallville all destroyed by the New Kryptonians as they were just starting to film the new season. As soon as I got a new computer that had room for additional software, I downloaded IRC. I'd been hearing about IRC for years, but my old 486 was out of space. And since then, I've met some really wonderful folcs--both online and in person (/me waves to Karl & Lori, Anne, and the Boston gang). :)