Still an odd duck and also still here!

Well hello, everybody!

I am sorry that I have been 100% off the grid lately. The past year has been....just freaking nuts. Husband and I bought a house, I started a new job, I finished book 2 of The Overlord Rising. Yeah, it's been a crazy year. I won't pretend that some of my silence hasn't been due to my old friend depression, but I am still here and am going to make a concerted effort to post more regularly.

Ok, so today I want to talk about my intro to fandom.

To get into my relationship with fandom, we kind of have to get into the kind of kid I was.

I was a bit of an odd duck. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but as many of you know, that can suck for a kid. I got bullied a lot when I was younger. I had trouble relating to other people my age. I had an easier time talking to my teachers than I did to my peers. I was that kid. I was also an avid reader. I read in the car, waiting outside ballet class, every spare second at home; if you gave me a book, I would devour it. However, I wouldn't say I was in a fandom.

That being said, there were authors who I read assiduously. I read Boxcar Children, Sweet Valley High, and Babysitters Club. And then, I kind of found my niche. I stumbled upon Werewolf of Fever Swamp by R.L. Stine and then proceeded to devour pretty much every Goosebumps book that existed. From then on, I was a full-on horror reader. I gobbled up the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books (and spent probably an unhealthy amount of time looking over the amazing illustrations). Despite the urgings of my godparents, I read Pet Sematary when I was way too young and was completely hooked on Stephen King by about age 11. The opening of Cujo is still the reason that open closet doors freak me right the fuck out as an adult. However, none of my friends were big horror readers, so this wasn't exactly something we could share.

Fortunately, we soon got the chance to share something special. In the fourth grade, my dear friend Elena noticed my love of animals and shyly introduced me to the Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate. Welp. That was a problem. Problem in the sense that I read the first one and was completely, irretrievably hooked. She was very kind and let me borrow her copies, which I devoured but was an absolute BEAST about returning in a reasonable manner. (I only just returned a Dragonlance anthology to Kevin that I've had for about 10 years (sorry again!)). Well, this led to countless hours of talking about what our different animals would be if we had encountered Elfangor. We had lists (btw, guys, I still have those) talking about what our North American morphs would be (I was a wolf, obviously), African, Australian, Ocean, River, Prehistoric (Utah raptor, obviously). There may have been fanfiction, although I can't find proof of that anywhere.

We obsessed about the series, coming up with our own theories about what would happen next, plugging ourselves into the stories, and generally just getting really creative with the fun ideas that Animorphs gave us. We learned a lot about each other during this time. We learned how we saw ourselves within the group dynamic, which of us favored head on confrontation and which favored diplomacy, we learned who wanted to operate within the rules and who was ok being outside of them. We had charged debates about the merits of our “morphs” within the greater context of saving the world from alien domination. We even talked about what we'd want our friends to do if we were infected by a Yeerk and they knew. We talked about our weaknesses and how they would be reflected in the animals that we chose. These conversations gave me a whole lot of insight into the person that I was and how that might not exactly line up with the person I wanted to be.

For example, Cassie is the one who I wanted to be. She was kind and good with animals, lived on a farm, and was the estreen, the one with the natural gift for changing shapes and doing it beautifully. Realistically, I was a lot more like Rachel, the one who's battle form was an elephant and consistently threw herself headlong into situations without all the way thinking them through. Some people who know me might be inclined to say that I still operate more on passion than sense, though I certainly hope I've gotten a little more steady as I've gotten older.

As you can probably guess, Animorphs had a huge impact on my relationship with reading. It was the first time that I really got personally invested in a series and the first time that I really engaged with “fandom”. I had never really put myself in the place of the characters before. I'd never considered the idea of “what if I could actually make a difference?” before, but Animorphs was the series that actually made me start thinking about that. Granted, this very idea has lead to some embarrassing self-insert Mary Sues in my own fanfiction, but we'll get to that in time. Maybe. If I don't burn it.

Thank you for your patience and for reading!

Love,

E.W.