Solo (UK fan)

Fan
Name:	Solo
Alias(es):
Type:	fan writer, convention organzier
Fandoms:	Starsky & Hutch
Communities:
Other:
URL:
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Solo is a Starsky & Hutch fan who lives in the UK. She writes fan fiction and for many years maintained a Starsky & Hutch reference website. In the early 2000s, she attended Zedcon and in 2002 she organized the Bay City Bash.

In 2006, Solo wrote about her introduction to fandom:

I got involved with fandom in... must have been 1980, after being a Starsky & Hutch fan for a year and a bit, and finally finding some postal addresses of other fans in one of the commercial magazines and writing off to them. They were in the U.S. - in the days when a letter took a week and a bit to get there, and same time again for the reply to get back. (Uphill in the snow both ways, of course.) Fortunately, the two women I wrote to were very nice, extremely responsive, willing to help a total newbie get used to fandom as a concept, and... were also in the process of producing the first ever S&H slash anthology. :-) I had obviously never heard of slash before, but the concept made instant sense. I think I'd been a slasher all my life; suddenly those strange feelings I'd been having reading my Cowboy and Indian novels between the ages of 6 and 14 started to make a lot of sense.

There was a letterzine. It came out every month, and had the kind of discussions which later moved to mailing lists and are now had on LJ. It even had flamewars. There was the infamous one about the Kiss in the Alley: did they or didn't they, with drawn diagrams (nobody had VCRs).

I never contributed, not least because by the time one letterzine reached me in Europe, the response deadline for the next one was usually almost past. But leaving aside how long everything took, it was a great introduction to fandom. I finally started to get more active once things went online and timezones rather than snailmail became the issue. Much easier to handle.

I loved mailing lists. They had more of a focus than you can generally find on LJ, though I find communities make up for some of that. They could be filtered in all kinds of clever ways. They could be searched. You could always go offlist if you wanted to say something to just one person, but I liked the 'everybody reads everybody's stuff' default. It was also easier to save fiction from them. Multi-parters on LJ drive me nuts.