End of an era?

[scarfman]

I've been rereading scarfmom's fanfiction, some of it - the earliest stuff - having only just become available online on a friend's site when the friend realized it wasn't online already, as well as what she's put online herself. It makes me want to sit down and write some new fanfiction myself. Good old fashioned prose fanfiction, pure words.

At the same time ...

For the fortieth anniversary of Doctor Who in November 2003, I wrote and drew for my website the multicrossover story The Circle of Time with which, to the best of my ability, I answered all the questions I'd ever left hanging about the universe in which my crossovers are set (at least one of those questions going back to my first Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover serialized on alt.drwho.creative in 1997). This despite the fact that I had always told myself that the story which answered all the questions would be a sort of capper to my fanfiction career (perhaps even to be melodramatically secreted away to be posted after my death), and now I was bringing it out just when it had been announced that there would be a new Doctor Who tv show in 2005 after a lapse of sixteen years.

There was a single exception to this answering-of-all-questions: in the Doctor's conversation with Luke Skywalker's niece and nephew there's an allusion to the Doctor being instrumental in the redemption of the Chosen Jedi. This was a new question. At the time and for some time after, the notes at the end of The Circle of Time on my website promised that tale once the sourceworks had concluded the Clone Wars trilogy. Last year when the "first" Star Wars trilogy wrapped up, I announced within a week in one or two forums that I'd outlined my "third trilogy" and would debut Episode VII in May 2006.

Also at the time of The Circle of Time, in at least one internet forum, I promised I would, as I had done for years' stories previously, produce a King Arthur in Time and Space version of The Circle of Time, and debut it May 2004 for the fifth anniversary of King Arthur in Time and Space. In 2004 I discovered that the personal account webspace where my fanfiction is archived had been expanded with room enough for all the Daily cartoon which had heretofore been rotating through the website, and through 2005 I uploaded them ten, fifteen or twenty a week.

In May 2004, no KAITAS version of The Circle of Time appeared. It's now March 2006, and Star Wars Episode VII: A Galaxy Divided remains in outline form. Eleven months ago I adopted a "sketchbook" format for the new cartoons on the fanfiction website, wishing to "reduce self-restriction in aid of production", but production continues to dwindle. And when I completed adding all active Dailies permanently to the website I found that there was only about ten percent of the alloted server space remaining.

What did appear in May 2004 was Arthur, King of Time and Space, my conventional webcomic (for conventional, read not derivative of others' intellectual property).

I'm thinking maybe it's coming up on time to own my change of focus and to retire my fanfiction site. Not to take it offline, but call it a capped-off, completed work or collection of works. I always come back to fanfiction but it's not where I am now.

Or maybe I'm just tired.

In other news I've dropped about ten pounds in about two weeks just by drastically reducing snack intake.

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[ladyrutile.livejournal.com]

To continue to live while we continue to breathe, we must allow our dreams to transform us. But, in the process, it is inevitable that as we change, we will also transform our dreams.
May you continue to go where your dreams take you, and may you be happy where ever that is.