User:Sperrywink
| Name/s: | sperrywink, slowerly |
| Fandom/s: | Popslash, Bandom, Glee, NCIS, MCU, The Losers |
| You can find me at: | Sperrywink's Dreamwidth
Sperrywink's AO3 |
| On Fanlore: | My contributions / email me |
As for my pseud, I am sperrywink, and have been sperrywink forever, almost everywhere. (Twitter's sperrywink is Sarah Perry (wink wink), who is a marine biologist. Not me.). I joined Fanfic.net under a different name because I thought I would write throwaway badfic and post it there, but I could never just write crap- I always had to put effort into it and turn it into something I wanted under my real pseud. I started with slowerly, but changed it to slowester later on. I also joined twitter under slowerly since I was following famous people and didn't want that associated with my fandom name.
sperrywink is an old college reference to when I was tripping on acid and trying to say spiderwebs to describe the colorful tracers I was seeing. It came out as sperrywink.
Fannish History
As happens for a lot of us older fandom peeps, I was introduced to fanfic via Star Trek. In this case it was Deep Space Nine, and a coworker at the university lab I was working in sat me down and had me read a Jadzia/Kira story. I had no idea what was going on. Was it an episode recap? Was it a tie-in short story? I had no clue it was written by fans for fans until years later, and realized that she had been trying to share fandom with me, not just a story. At the time, I just said it was cool, shrugged, and went on with my life.
It wasn't until about 2 years later, after I had graduated and moved on, that I discovered fanfic that pinged for me. I had my first real computer job in 2000. As you do in boring jobs, I surfed the web. One day I was searching for favorite TV shows that I had loved but lost track of, I searched for due South. As I am sure is no surprise to anyone, due Slash was one of the first hits. I *devoured* those stories (at work, as you did back then).
I had always read romance novels, and loved romance, but I had often been frustrated by the women characterizations and their behaviors that were so different from the way I would react to the events of the given book. I couldn't identify with the women characters, even though I thought I should. Discovering due South slash freed me from that constraint and it was glorious. It was discovering thousands of stories that could have been written just for me and my quirks. At this time I didn't quite understand there were real fans behind the stories, so feedbacking was a foreign concept to me. Email strangers out of the blue? You must be mad!
So I continued to read stories for the next 2 years, expanding out of due South to X-Files and Buffy, and I don't even remember what all else. I just followed link after link until I ended up at Popslash and Livejournal in 2002. Suddenly there were real people behind the awesome stories I had been reading! And they were cool and funny and interested in the same things I was into! Since I knew no one, and no one knew me, I bought my Livejournal paid membership; I didn't get an invite code. And then I lurked and slowly accrued friends. Without_me and dick_grayson were my first 2 friends. I think I was up to 17 friends by the time a year had rolled by, and that felt overwhelming. Ahaha!
As I mentioned to turps, since I started with Popslash, and didn't grow up on mailing lists, I didn't think RPS was taboo, and was a bit flabbergasted by the hate. I actually considered RPS *less* problematic than FPS, since you aren't infringing on someone else' intellectual property, which I considered the bigger issue in my naivete!
But back to my story. I wasn't a writer at this stage. I had Popslash story ideas or fantasies I would entertain while going to sleep or whenever, but I had always had a bit of writer's block when writing for school, so I never even considered writing them down. I was actually really into a reader's right to be an active part of fandom, and not just a second class citizen at the time. And I was a voracious reader. I read in every fandom I had even slight knowledge of.
It wasn't until autumn of 2006 that I thought I could write a short story. And I did and it was horrible! It was SGA, and nothing happened in it but introspection and it was riddled with math links. it was so passive! But then I wrote a short Popslash story, and joined DWNOGA, and got some excellent beta advice from silveryscrape, and the ball started rolling. I was slowly moving away from Popslash and into crime shows like NCIS, Criminal Minds, and CSI, and they were my first successful longer story fandoms. It was about this time that I said, "I like the music, but I can't imagine writing about these Bandom people." Oh famous last words (pun intended), because not a year later, there I was writing the Bandom peeps, as you do.
So it was then 2007, and I am fully immersed in Bandom, while still dabbling in all my old fandoms. Going to concerts, going to cons, and having a blast, for the most part. This continues for the next couple of years, and I pick up Glee, Star Trek 2009, and Adam Lambert as fandoms, and continue expanding my writing chops.
And then 2014 was the Year of The Losers, and now it is 2020 and what has the last 5 years brought into my life fannishly? Well, a lot of fandoms, actually. I seem to be even more multifannish than previously, which is hard to do, but apparently I am an overachiever. *g*
In no particular order, since they all are smushed together over the intervening years with nothing like my dedication to The Losers in 2014: MCU, Numb3rs, The Flash, Harry Potter (a return of a reading fandom into a writing one), Teen Wolf, Magnificent Seven (Movie 2016), Magic Mike XXL.
But really, I am here for fandom, and consider my canons secondary. There will always be some new shiny to attract my attention, but fandom is a constant presence for me, or has been for the last 20 years.
Current Favorites
Currently most of my writing energy is devoted to Glee's non-canon ship of Blaine Anderson/Sebastian Smythe. I am a sucker for Darren Criss' Blaine, and I can't stand what TPTB did to Kurt/Blaine, so I have developed some additional unholy love for Sebastian. I am also into Prodigal Son and have written some drabbles for that, but expect it to become more as time goes by.