The Prison of His Days

Some day, since nobody else seems to be going to do so, I am going to write a book. A nonfiction book. And this book will be about fandom. It will be about the history of (Western) fandom, how it goes back much farther than we in the modern day think--since, after all, who owns Hercules? Where would Virgil be without Homer? Does Ovid have a copyright on Ariadne? Our culture makes distinctions between what is okay and fanfic, but these distinctions are false. They're covering up the actual distinction, which is that intellectual property laws changed the rules...and, of course, fanfic must be weird, because it's written by women and queers--and queer women! End of world alert! And I wish to investigate when exactly fandom switched from being respectable (done by men) to not (done by women). And then I wish to explain in short little words how we are not weird, we are not deviant, we are not new, we are tapping into a vein of creativity that's as old as Western civilization--upon which Western civilization was founded!--so there's nothing wrong with us.

Because someone in fandom, someone who is one of us, someone who understands, needs to write the seminal text on fanfic before some (straight, white, male) outsider does one that looks at us like crazy people or bugs on a slide, above all like others. Because we're really not, and I may not know a lot about psychology, but I've got a smattering of gender theory (okay, more than a smattering, but by people-talking-about-gender-theory standards, it's assembled from bits and bobs all over) and I know a lot about storytelling.