Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“Librarians are wonderful people, partly because they are, on the whole, unaware of how dangerous knowledge is. Karl Marx upended the political landscape of the twentieth century sitting at a library table. Still, modern librarians are more afraid of ignorance than they are of the political devastation that knowledge can bring.”

—Walter Mosley, The Long Fall



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Since it's a three day weekend and I'm tired I decided to take at least one day where I goof off completely—absolutely no productive content whatsoever!—I've been very busy being non-productive. The brain keeps cycling back to thinking about productive things, but I wrench it back to piffle whenever I catch myself thinking about anything that has any meaning.

And every once in a while when I don't feel like doing anything productive, I engage in google searches of my name and the names of others. (I'm really quite an absurd human being sometimes.) A complete time waster, but sometimes quite a strange experience. There's apparently a thoracic surgeon named PJ Thompson and a financial writer. There are too many Pamela Thompsons to bother with. It's most strange when I type in the nom de plumes I used for fanfic. I didn't do a lot: one ST:V novella and a satirical newsletter based around the TV version of La Femme Nikita. (Well, okay, there were a lot of issues of that satire, but whatever. I didn't write and post fanfic for a lot of shows.) The thing that I find odd in my head-in-the-clouds way is that this stuff never seems to go away. It just cycles endlessly. That's okay—I'm happy people are still enjoying it—I just find it kind of odd. I don't know why I should find it odd, but I do. It's ancient history to me. But not to everyone.

The last time I typed in the name I used for my one and only piece of Star Trek porn (posted December 1997), I got one page of entries on google. I was surprised to find even that many, but apparently a number of people had linked to the site where the story was posted. Some had included it in their favorites list (thank you very much!). And of course there was the Golden Orgasm I won for it that year from ASCEM. I even got a vote for Best Hot Sex—well, a split vote between me and someone else. But thanks! I appreciate that very much.

I guess the strangest entry was for an academic article, published in the Journal of American Culture, which discussed fanfic (and Janeway/Chakotay porn in particular). It used my story for its analysis (amongst others). I was dying to read that one. The publisher would sell a pdf for $26.00 but my curiosity wasn't that great. Some of the local libraries had copies of the magazine—at least in their online catalogs. Inevitably, when the actual search for the particular issue was conducted, the issue in question had disappeared from the shelves. One sad archive librarian at the main library in downtown L.A. said that this sort of thing went on all the time anymore. People had no compunction about stealing or destroying magazines and books.

Loyola Marymount said they'd xerox a copy for me, but I had to appear in person to claim it, and because I was non-student, non-faculty I'd have to pay them $10 to copy it plus parking on campus. That was starting to make the $26 look not so bad. But an intrepid research assistant buddy of mine at work thought she could do a better job of finding this thing and within a half hour had found a free pdf on the LA County Library website! Apparently they'd scanned it before somebody stole it.

Reading that article was definitely odd.

So today, non-productive day, trying desperately to keep my mind off The Novel or anything relating to it, I typed in that fanfic name again. There were pages and pages of entries this time! Apparently some guy with the same last name as the novelist I cribbed my last name from wrote an article which mentions the poet I cribbed for my first name, so there were lots of references there. Plus many for the Star Trek porn, including some ones that weren't there before.

Life is funny. Especially when I think I may never get published by the establishment no matter how hard I work or how serious I am, while this stuff that I did for fun way back when cycles and cycles and cycles... Don't get me wrong—I'm happy to have readers. I might still be writing fanfic if I hadn't started longing to tell my own stories with my own characters. Fanfic wasn't doing it for me anymore. So I stopped writing it—but it was a great training ground and I learned many important lessons from the experience of writing it.

Which shows, I suppose, that sometimes even goofing off can have an unanticipated productive side.