I'm looking forward to telling stories to my children

Thanks to a certain cohort of mine, I may or may not have just stumbled on something that suprised even me:
Alice in Wonderland FanFiction.

It wasn't the creepy, "slash"-y, nerd-rotic stuff that creeps around like a dangerous beast across the web, just a person who was clearly very enthused about a particular set of characters. It just...would never have occured to me.

Alright, then. So lets talk about fanfiction for a while. We'll start it off here: I have never written any of it. Well, unless you count my picture-book version of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings which I did with construction paper, crayon, and twine when I was around 6. With co-writing and production credits going to my dear father, I can safely say it's my finest published work so far.
That being said, I've always been a little wary of it. I mean, there are a lot of weird stereotypes, creepy guys in basements, etc. For the good lord's sake--the genre arguably started with fantasies about Kirk and Spock (someone correct me if I'm wrong here). A lot of it deviates into often brazenly sexual pieces--which I guess is rather unsurprising, as it is on the internet. Most of the writing ranges from amateur to horrible, and the bits of writing that are good I would imagine tend to be conflated with the bad, and are thus probably hard to find.

Hold on, though. Lets step back for a second. In some ways, isn't this just a return to the collective storytelling of the good old days? By good old days, I'm not talking about my ancestors on their way to Zion/Utah---I mean the real good old days, when the Skald were singing up north, or the generations of storytellers who led up to Homer, or even just the six guys sitting around a little fire, munching on a bit of dinosaur. You know. Waaaaay back. 6011 years ago...when the earth began.

Right guys?

No, but seriously. Check it out. What is this but the process of acquiring/adopting/appropriating a set of characters created by someone else and telling your own story with them? Isn't that the idea behined Anasazi? Or Coyote? Or Ajax and Achilles? All of Greek Drama is based around that idea. How are the large collective of nerds sitting around the collective lights of their computer screens that much different from the old days when ten or twenty of us would get together at night around a fire and listen to someone tell stories about people whom he or she had heard stories about? Its a shame we don't do it that way anymore---and maybe the lack of face to face interaction is a real loss---but I think, at its core, the idea is still great. The collective craftingshapingmoldingrecreating of a character is a beautiful thing. Maybe we're too hung up on copywright---sure, if you created a peice of art, it should be yours if you want it to be...but maybe, every once in a while, it would be okay to give something you created to the rough hands of the masses, and see what they do with it. Isn't that how we've gotten a lot of our really great characters? Arthur, Robin Hood, Jack? It's not the "great works" that make us remember them---its the mass of stories (I was going to use the modifier "untold" to emphasize how many stories there were...but I guess that's the whole point-they were told).

So- maybe we need to learn something from the fan-fiction people. We may not like the stories they tell, may not agree with their use of copywrited material, may be uncomfortable with their racy-ness and such...but maybe something our culture needs is a few collective stories, or just a forum where we could tell them. I guess right now, the internet is the best place for that to happen.

Alright. Time to stop talking, get to bed. Take care all, hope we're all doing well!


A final side note: does anyone know the song "Living Next Door to Alice"? It's a 70's(maybe?) era song, jangly guitars, yadda yadda...anyway, I've found a copy of the song---but has anyone ever heard the amazing techno remix? I heard it once, when I was at my friend Tommy's place at least 4-5 years back....and it's actually still stuck in my head. Each day I get a little closer to finding an .mp3 of the song. If someone knows what I'm talking about, I'd be greatly appreciative of any information.