Okay, I'm going to 'fess up, here and now. When I first discovered Oz, I came online after watching my first episode and Googled around to get info on the show and the characters. I had no real knowledge about what fan fiction was then, just some vague, half-formed idea that it was something 8-year-old girls wrote about the members of Duran Duran. I came across the Em City archive and tumbled head-first into "Wife" -- and it was, in all honesty, a revelation to me.
I could write an entire essay about the impact that fic had on me -- not only because of the story itself (which is powerful, engrossing, emotionally wrenching, hideous and beautiful both -- not to mention your gorgeous writing style, which I think every new writer in Oz fandom has tried to emulate at least once!), although that's certainly a huge part of it, but also because it was my first introduction to that perception that we, as fannish people, share: that intangible thing that makes us want to get *into* something, to go deeper than the source, to explore it from all of its angles, blow it apart. And until then, I had no idea there were other people out there doing that - certaionly not real writers, writers who knew how to do it and do it well. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that your story changed my life.
(And on a less esoteric note: you made Schillinger fucking Beecher *hot* - something I would never have admitted was possible in a million years! And I still get shivery whenever I think about that scene with Beecher and Schillinger on Sister Pete's desk: Beecher's "I always knew it!" destroys me every time. )
no subject
Okay, I'm going to 'fess up, here and now. When I first discovered Oz, I came online after watching my first episode and Googled around to get info on the show and the characters. I had no real knowledge about what fan fiction was then, just some vague, half-formed idea that it was something 8-year-old girls wrote about the members of Duran Duran. I came across the Em City archive and tumbled head-first into "Wife" -- and it was, in all honesty, a revelation to me.
I could write an entire essay about the impact that fic had on me -- not only because of the story itself (which is powerful, engrossing, emotionally wrenching, hideous and beautiful both -- not to mention your gorgeous writing style, which I think every new writer in Oz fandom has tried to emulate at least once!), although that's certainly a huge part of it, but also because it was my first introduction to that perception that we, as fannish people, share: that intangible thing that makes us want to get *into* something, to go deeper than the source, to explore it from all of its angles, blow it apart. And until then, I had no idea there were other people out there doing that - certaionly not real writers, writers who knew how to do it and do it well. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that your story changed my life.
(And on a less esoteric note: you made Schillinger fucking Beecher *hot* - something I would never have admitted was possible in a million years! And I still get shivery whenever I think about that scene with Beecher and Schillinger on Sister Pete's desk: Beecher's "I always knew it!" destroys me every time. )