PPS Bobtheskull, what the heck is a LART?!?

I'm going to break the unwritten help desk code and answer that. A LART is a Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool. Luser as in user with an L in front of it.

I have a LART of my own that also serves as a Cluebat - it beats clues into those who have none.


And just to prove it's mine, here's the back of it...

Way back in the olden days, before the Internets, I wrote Duran Duran "fan fic". I was 14. (where's the embarrassed emoticon when you need it?) There were about 10 of us who wrote and exchanged stories back in junior high school ('83-84). It's the sort of thing that I wouldn't discuss in therapy, frankly. Not sure why I'm sharing it now, but there it is. I moved from Duran Duran stories to what they call Real Person Stories, but eventually I figured out that was just kind of creepy and quit that, too.

So, yeah, cut to the year the X-Files came out ('93). That was when I found out that there was such a thing as fan fic and that *gasp* our group of junior high students wasn't actually doing something original. Heh. I belonged to a mailing list that had some ok fan fic, but I wasn't writing anything sharable. I had tons of ideas, but nothing I felt like putting to paper.

Then came Gladiator and Russell Crowe. Oh my dear and fluffy lord, that got me writing. I fell in with a group of women who had beta testers and cared that what they wrote made a certain sense. They had their own little universe where characters from Crowe's movies existed outside of their own worlds. Something about that caught my attention and I wrote like mad for about six months, I think, and I actually shared it with this group - the first time in over 10 years anyone else had read what I'd written. Then I just stopped writing. Stopped cold. I guess I was partially tired of explaining what I was "banging away at" to my husband and something else, but I don't know what. Maybe it was Everquest... That seems pretty likely. That group still writes and what they write is not only readable, but it's usually really good. I still read a lot of their stuff, too, and it's still better written than 99% of what's out there.

Anyway, I still occasionally get an idea for some sort of original story - I get about 8 or 9 pages into it and stop. I lean heavily towards writing romance type stuff, even though that's only about 1/3rd of what I read anymore, because I find it easy (to a point).

So I guess I'm in favor of fanfic to an extent. The crazy people, though, they bug me...