OTW Guest Post: Lee & Colleen
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | OTW Guest Post: Lee & Colleen |
| Interviewer: | Claudia Rebaza |
| Interviewee: | Lee & Colleen |
| Date(s): | July 7, 2018 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | |
| External Links: | "OTW Guest Post: Lee & Colleen". Archived from the original on 2018-07-10. |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
OTW Guest Post: Lee & Colleen is a 2018 interview done as part of a series. See OTW Guest Post.
Some Topics Discussed
- The X-Files, General Hospital
- harnessing the energy and power of fanfiction writers for original fiction
Some Excerpts
How did you first get into fandom and fanworks?
Lee: Back in 1996, a kid in my fifth-grade class told me about this cool TV show The X-Files, where these two FBI agents investigated paranormal phenomena (he probably didn’t phrase it quite like that, though). We had just gotten the internet at home, so the first thing I did was go to Yahoo! (which was an index of websites at the time) to find websites about The X-Files. I was enthralled, and spent the next few weeks reading detailed summaries of every XF episode that had aired up through the fourth season.
After I’d memorized everything about the entire first couple of seasons, I was desperate for more Mulder and Scully, so I wondered whether anyone had written stories set in the XF universe. Once I stumbled across an XF fanfiction webring, I was hooked; I spent the whole summer of 1996 carrying around a yellow accordion folder full of Mulder/Scully Romance fanfiction that I’d printed out. We had a dot-matrix printer, which meant that I’d spend hours tearing the dotted edges off of the paper and then carefully tearing the perforated paper into individual sheets.
I wrote my first fic when I was 11. Besides my obsession with XF, I was also into New York City and the TV show Friends, so I wrote a crossover wherein Mulder and Scully went to New York City to solve a case, fell in love (of course), and met up with the cast of Friends. It’s been lost to the tides of time, which is too bad, because I would love to go back and read it, but I was too shy to post it anywhere, and cloud storage hadn’t been invented yet.
Then, in 1999, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was released, and it was instantly apparent to me that Sirius and Remus were madly in love. (13-year-old me read “They embraced like brothers” and immediately thought, “Yeah, sure…’brothers,’ got it.”) They were my first gay OTP. Once I discovered slash fic, I was instantly hooked, and it’s all been joy from there.
Colleen: Hilariously, I got into fandom because of the soap opera General Hospital. My friends and I used to watch forums for spoilers and deep analysis of the day’s episode (told you it was hilarious), and on the old SoapZone website was a fan fiction forum. I clicked it out of curiosity and a whole new world opened up before my eyes. Later, I thought to myself, “Boy I sure do love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I wonder if people write fan fiction for that?!” My teenage self had no IDEA what was about to happen.
What experiences in fandom led you to create Carnation Books?
Lee: A lot of little things added up to plant the idea in my subconscious, and I was definitely fortunate to be able to make it possible in the first place (I especially am lucky for the support of my wonderful husband Ben, whom I’ve been with for 10 years this February). But there was one occurrence that sticks out very clearly in my mind:
In 2016, I was sitting on the couch next to my husband, who was playing a video game, and I was reading the epic Kylo Ren/General Hux series Children, Wake Up by hollycomb on my Kindle. And I remember thinking that this was the most beautiful writing I’d ever laid my eyes on, and it was so heart-wrenchingly gorgeous that I closed my Kindle and laid down on my husband’s lap and cried just a little bit.
Shortly after that, I was reflecting on the experience of being so deeply moved, and I thought, “I would love to read stories that are just like fanfiction, but with original characters. I bet fanfiction writers would be awesome at writing original fiction.” And things happened very quickly after that, and Carnation Books was born in August 2016.
Colleen: I joined Carnation Books in January of 2017. I had been stuck in lurker status for a while, having lost steam in my fic writing, and falling behind in keeping up with my online fandom pals. Just a month or so earlier I had written my first fic in years. I still read fic daily, and as a Sherlock fan had been listening to Three Patch Podcast since its inception. I was listening to it in my car, and heard Lee talking about this company they’d started called Carnation Books. What Lee had to say about fandom and the importance of fan works had me pulling over in the Target parking lot to listen. I emailed a few days later offering my assistance getting this thing off the ground.
What fandom things have inspired you the most?
Lee: Fan creativity never ceases to astound me. And I’ve made amazing friends within fandom. I don’t want to namedrop because I don’t want to forget anyone, but I’ve met some truly wonderful people through fandom, and their warmth, kindness, and generosity of spirit inspire me every day.
Colleen: Fandom has inspired me over and over in so many different ways. This group of people is ginormous and capable of amazing work. We don’t all know each other, or like the same things. We might not be in the same fandoms but we’re all IN fandom. People have banded together to raise money for important causes. People have helped each other out in times of need. I have friends in fandom that I’ve known longer than my best friend in real life, and I’ve never met them in person. I get holiday cards from people in Canada, a place I’ve never been, because fandom brought us together as friends. When I have felt terrible, at my lowest point, when it has all seemed hopeless, fandom has been there to soothe and boost me. From major deeds to small ones, fandom is just awesome. That inspires me to keep being a part of it, and to make what I do count toward making it an even better place.