BRW: Behind the Blind 11

Several years ago, I wrote a Marvel Comics fanfic based on Secret Wars, the miniseries from the eighties, just for the heck of it. You may know that the next Avengers movie after this winter’s Doomsday will be a loose adaptation of this story.

I found a home for it. It’s novella-length—a little over 25,000 words. The original plot from the comic book is the same; I just expanded on it by adding scenes and doing my best to patch holes.

I treated it like a work of my own. The most important element, for me, was to take an inherently outrageous premise—cosmic entity gathering superhumans together to fight each other for the right to see their deepest desires fulfilled—and to find the humanity within it. Knowing the characters helped.

SW was created to sell toys. While there were legitimate character moments throughout the original story, it was a highly commercial enterprise that begat the modern era in comics of “crossover events,” end-of-the-world stories told within many different comic books, involving characters who normally don’t interact with each other.

And yet I still have affection for it, over forty years later. Flaws and all.

Why else would I have written a fanfic of it?

Writing 

I’ve started work on a new, original novella. This one is about science fiction fandom in the seventies, with an emphasis on Star Trek and Star Wars (but mostly Trek).

My sources so far:

• Star Trek Phase II: The Lost Series by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens
• The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture by Susan Sackett and Gene Roddenberry
• Inside Star Trek: The Real Story by Herbert F. Solow & Robert H. Justman
• this post from my previous blog, and
• this post about Star Trek vs. Star Wars,

but primarily, this remarkable website called Fanlore. It has been a goldmine of information about fandom in the sixties and seventies, directly from fans of that era. I cannot emphasize how much this has helped with the story I’m writing.

My own experiences have helped too. In the nineties and 2000s, when I self-published comic books, I went to conventions around the country. While what I went through wasn’t quite the same—fandom was very much an established thing by then—that period of my life has helped inform the characters a bit. 

Also, since this is another story set in Queens, my memories of the Flushing neighborhood play a small part, though not exclusively. I’ve looked at Facebook groups devoted to Flushing and online images of certain places which used to be there. I spent a day there recently, reacquainting myself with streets and sites.

I’m aiming for 30000 words, but I’m wondering if it might not be longer and turn into an actual novel. I dunno.  The more I learn about fandom from this era, the more I’m in danger of drowning in detail. I have to make conscious decisions as to which ones to leave out. The perils of writing historical fiction, I guess—though whether or not the 1970s count as HF is debatable.

I’m stuck at the moment on character development, but hopefully, I’ll get out of it. This is a story I want to tell.

Reading

Back in April, I attended a choral concert with music inspired by the work of William Shakespeare. You may know his birthday is in April.

I remember going to a Shakespeare In the Park performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when I was in junior high school. In high school I used Cliff Notes to understand his plays when I had to actually read them. 

In college I took an acting class, and one of the scenes I performed was from Hamlet. By then I felt like I grokked the language better, if for no other reason than I had seen Shakespeare performed and had made a greater effort to interpret it.

Yes, the English language is full of his phrases. Many works of fiction have titles taken from his work or are modernizations of them.

But since leaving school for good, I can’t say I’ve made an effort to re-read his work much. If I were teaching him, I’d start with his sonnets. Poetry is more about interpretation, so that may make for more of a gateway into his plays. I dunno. Besides, you can’t truly appreciate him unless you read him in the original Klingon.

He remains a great part of Western literature.

Miscellany 

In case you missed it: my short story “The Owl and The Nurse,” as published on Spillwords, who also interviewed me.

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Jenny Hammerton from Dinner and a Movie also does a Substack devoted to Angela Lansbury and Murder She Wrote. Jenny recently held a contest there where the prize was one of her cookbooks. Guess who won?