For lack of a title, I went with this.

After listening to James Paul Gee, I must admit to one pair of words that jumped out at me and completely derailed my thoughts for awhile, fan fiction.

I'll freely admit to my share of geeky fan fiction. I never ever posted it anywhere and more often than not was writing it with friends as a way to pass the time between races at track meets or at lunch in middle school. We had a whole five subject notebook simply for the purpose of fan fiction, and two three inch floppies we swapped each weekend until they were nearly full. I currently have one in my possession but no reader so I can only relate what I remember.

We started the fan fiction notebook during a lull in the flow of Gundam Wing tapes (later DVDs) from Japan. My friend Sarah was obsessed and as she was the provider of the media we watched a lot of it. When we finished whatever set we had and there wasn't one to move on to, to give Sarah her fix, we started writing our own episodes.

At the time, I wanted to be a writer. I had no alternative career path and was one hundred percent convinced of my brilliance. I used the fan fics as a way to experiment with characterization and writing styles. The girls complained that my stuff deviated too much from Gundam so I started my own non-anime story that was entirely fiction. This evolved into a second notebook with just one other friend that turned into a set of six of a YA story. One of at least five that I wrote to the middle and didn't have the heart to finish.

While I no longer believe I'll be able to live by my writing, in fact I don't write fiction or even poetry much anymore, I do still believe that I am a good writer. It was the years spent filling those fan fiction notebooks and collaboration with my friends that aided me on that score. We edited each other's entries; grammar, punctuation, spelling, story-lines, you name it. We were precocious and snotty, but by the time we dropped the activity in high school, our language arts skills were considerably more advanced than our peers. In my case, it was commented on by teachers and they indulged my fiction writing habit by letting me write during DEAR wednesdays.

James Paul Gee's video clip on Edutopia brought me right back to that middle school self, braids and braces, using red pen and smugly correcting Kat's entries. It took me about fifteen minutes to come back to the video and think about what else he had to say. Which will be addressed in a more serious blog entry to follow.

More on life in about thirty seconds,
~Ren