Transwarp wrote:Brandyjane wrote:I guess this "secret life" is about as innocuous as possible, so what's the harm?
No harm at all! You post a reply in a forum or two, then a topic for a drabble catches your eye. You pound out a couple of those. That wasn't so bad, so you try your hand at a missing scene, or a short little vignette sparked by the word-of-the-month. Next thing you know, you're in the middle of a hundred-thousand-plus word Romulan War epic, which is all you can think of or write about and everyone starts looking at you funny but the voices tell you to ignore them 'cause after all they don't understand they're JEALOUS of you, they just want to hurt you, they're bad they're BAD you need to hurt them first so they won't try to stop you can't let them stop you Must Hurt Them First...
No harm at all.
EXACTLY! You don't just wake up, a normal person, one day and go, "Y'know I think i'm going to make 5578 posts on a TripnTpol-specific message board." No. FIRST it's the year 2004 or so, and you're up late one night Googling Star Trek, and you stumble on this "House of Tucker" place that claims to be a "shipper's" site. What is a shipper you ask? The first fic you read happens to contain a not-so-hot literal rendering of Trip's Southern accent. You think, "Wow. I think I could show THAT person a thing or two about how Trip talks. I'll write a page or two." That turned into the forgotten time part 1 and then part 2 which was 100's o' pages long. THEN you stumble into the NC 17 section and think, "Yeah, I bet I could do one of those maybe" and then that turns into the Coituses: Experimentus, Conceptus, Infrequentus. AND THEN SOMEONE COMES UP WITH THE IDEA FOR DRABBLES AND SO ON AND SO ON AND SO ON.........THERE IS NO END.
Btw, everyone I know knows I love trek and go to conventions and post on a star trek msg board (i don't say which board). If I tell people this early on, they quickly figure out who they are dealing with, and adjust their frightened stares accordingly.
My favourite story begins like this:
"So this one time I flew to a Star Trek Convention in Texas and met up with an aerospace engineering student, a G.P., and an obstetrician who are all these star trek nerds I chat with online....."...by this point, one is certain of a "captive audience".