ne of my very lowest points was during a winter about a baker's dozen of years ago.
I had somehow landed a truly horrible job, 45 minutes from home, where I was given virtually no training, contradictory instructions, and very little supervision. Worst of all was that I had to publicly shame the owner into sending me my severance check, nearly three weeks after it had been promised, and I will never forget the cold, ugly tone in his voice when he grudgingly agreed to pay me what I was owed.
By the time Christmas rolled around I was so battered, and so desperate for money, that I ended up taking a two-day job as a mover simply to make enough to pay the mortgage that month. Even then, I'm not sure I would have made it if a dear friend hadn't figured out what was happening, stuffed a wad of cash into my hands, and told me to buy groceries and gasoline.
"Pay it forward," was all he said when I told him I couldn't possibly pay him back, and I came as close to crying in public as I ever have.
The one bright spot in that dark, dark season was Harry Potter.
Two friends had organized a movie night just after Thanksgiving to see the latest Harry Potter movie. I had a pass for a free ticket to the Heck Piazza Dodecaplex, plus popcorn and a soda, so I decided to attend even though I'd somehow managed to avoid the Pottermania sweeping the world. If nothing else it was an excuse to get out of the house and spend time with my friends, and that was something I desperately needed.
And so it was that I finally became acquainted with Harry, his friends, his enemies, and his world.
Of course I was entranced - how could I not be? - and even some of the similarities between Harry and the work of previous authors (particularly Neil Gaiman and Jane Yolen) did little to quell my enthusiasm. The books themselves had their flaws, and the last couple in particular suffered from being rushed to print before they were properly edited, but the world of Harry Potter was so rich and so full of possibilities that I found myself reading everything I could about the boy wizard. Books, articles, websites, blog posts...and, of course, the fanfiction.
I'd dabbled in Star Trek fandom in high school and college, to the point where I wrote a long, terrible, unreadable fan novel that was so bad I probably would have been asked to give back my Scholastic Writing Awards honorable mention if the judges had known of its existence. That had ended by the time I graduated and moved to Boston, and I hadn't read a single word of fanfic since around the time I got married in 1986.
That ended when my friend Mistress C sent me a link to a fanfic while I was still grubbing for temp work and contemplating whether I'd have to grovel before my aunt for money in lieu of snacking on the Triple Felinoid for their protein component. "I think you'll like this," she said.
I didn't like it. I loved it. And within hours of finishing it, I was working my way through everything else the author had written, then everything else I could find with a similar theme, romantic pairing, or setting. Soon I'd learned to knit so I could make my own Harry Potter scarf, had begun putting money aside to attend an upcoming convention/symposium in Salem called The Witching Hour, and was busily commenting on every fic, community, and piece of art I could find.
Then I began to write.
I hadn't written anything beyond the occasional documentation or class notes for an SCA event in at least ten or fifteen years, at least partially because I simply hadn't had the emotional energy to do so. A disintegrating marriage, dying relatives, and existential terror of losing all one's possessions, pets, and home is not precisely conducive to creativity, oddly enough, and by the time I encountered Harry Potter fandom I'd given up on the very idea of being a writer. The well was drier than the playa at Burning Man, or so I thought.
I was wrong. So very, very wrong.
I started with drabbles, 100 word stories on a simple prompt like "where did Professor Lupin before he came to Hogwarts?" or "What if Professor McGonagall's animagus form were something other than a cat?" but soon those weren't enough. By the end of that first glorious year I'd begun writing longer stories, a few hundred words apiece, and then I signed up for a fic exchange where I would write something as a gift for another participant. I had an idea that I thought would result in something a few thousand words long, only to find myself staring at a 30,000 word manuscript that only vaguely fit the prompt.…
Which promptly went viral when I posted it in four parts. Before I knew it I had a fanbase, people were doing art based on my stories, and I'd been invited to post on a major fanfic archive that was known for quality writing and sophisticated plots. Someone at The Witching Hour asked for my autograph (!), I began corresponding with Big Name Fans, and suddenly I had written several more novellas, dozens of short stories, and several thousand drabbles. Best of all, one of the fan contacts I made was with Cecilia Tan, the erotica writer and publisher, who went on to publish my very first original story, "The Place Where Heroes Are Made," in one of Circlet Press's fantasy erotica collections.
I also started writing these diaries. So if you enjoy our little trips into Badbookistan on Saturday night, raise a glass to Harry Potter and my buddy C, because without them I'd probably still be staring at the TV every night after work instead of writing, reviewing, and researching.
This is not to say that all my fannish experiences have been positive. I've come in for my share of criticisms (some deserved, some not so much), and I've had a front row seat at least two nasty controversies. I've also read some very, very, very bad fanfics, and not just the ones by newcomers who've never written anything before and are cautiously posting their less than golden words because they'll go absolutely crazy if they don't share their thoughts with someone. One of the aforesaid controversies involved an otherwise very good writer getting back at a former friend in a holiday fic exchange by deliberately including several plot points the recipient had explicitly said she did not want, and no, I will not share any further details. I've also encountered some that were so weird, or based on such awful prompts, that I've back clicked so fast I've damn near sprained my wrist.
Overall, though, fandom has been very, very good to me, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's always wondered "what if?" about a favorite character and wonders if anyone else feels the same way. Some of the very best SF and fantasy writers out there either have or still do write fanfic (including Nebula winner Naomi Novik and Hugo winner Seanan McGuire), so it's certainly worth a shot.
Tonight I bring you not a fic, but a book about a fanfic. This particular fic, which appeared a couple of years after I became active in Potter fandom, became so renowed for its astonishing (and possibly deliberate) lack of quality that I never was able to bring myself to read it. I heard about it, though, and like everyone else in the fandom, I'd wince whenever it was mentioned. I wasn't surprised when the author took it down, and beyond that I didn't give it much thought.
Then the author outed herself. A major publisher announced a memoir that promised to tell the true story behind the legendary fic would be published. The press revived the whole story...and then, before the memoir reached the store, the author's brother stepped forward to claim that not only was most of her memoir a fake, so was her claim to have written what may have been the Worst Fanfic in the World.
All of which leads to the question that still hasn't been solved, and may well never be solved: who wrote "My Immortal"?
Under the Same Stars: The Search for My Brother and the True Story of My Immortal, by Rose Christo - there are many, many fics that resemble "My Immortal," at least superficially. This badly spelled, badly characterized, badly footnoted, badly edited, just plain bad fic is firmly in the subgenre I will call "Draco is a shy, sensitive, misunderstood creature who deserves a good woman," with a strong streak of the old "a mysterious girl arrives at Hogwarts on a mysterious mission" trope and a healthy heap of anachronisms. Most of the rest manage to avoid the Olympian levels of bad plotting, atrocious grammar, and just plain stupidity of this masterwork of someone who wrote under the name of "XXXbloodyrists666XXX."
You think I exaggerate? You think I jest? You think I'm making this up? Just feast your jewel-colored orbs upon just some of the wonders in the forty-four chapters that besmirched FanFiction.Net in 2006 and 2007:
- - A heroine named "Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way," although "Ebony" might actually be spelled "Enoby," or "Eboby," or "Enopby," or Egogy, or several other variants.
- - Among these variants is "Tara" or "TaEbory," and no, that doesn't make any sense at all.
- - Eonby/Enoby/Enobby is actually a vampire with long black hair with reddish tips (seemingly natural) and "icy blue eyes like limpid tears." She's also a "goff," which may mean she's a Goth, or a MacGuffin, or simply that she likes to golf.
- - Draco Malfoy immediately falls in love with her, even though her Hot Topic wardrobe and two-tone hair clash horribly with Slytherin House robes. Draco's also bisexual and formerly dated Harry Potter, at least when he wasn't trying to kill him.
- - Hagrid, who's a teenager for some inexplicable reason, is a Satanist who's also in love with E-Tara.
- - Albus Dumbledore calls someone a "motherfuker," or possibly a "motherfucker," although for all I know the author meant someone who gave birth to a Fokker biplane. He also gives himself and the Great Hall a Goth makeover, the very thought of which makes me want to fling myself bodily off the French King Bridge.
- - Voldemort wants TaEbby to shoot Harry, the news of which so upsets poor Drago that he kills himself.
- - Most of the characters are renamed because they're all Goths, which means that Harry is now "Vampire" (although he isn't), Hermione is "Bloody Mary," and Ron is "Diablo."
- - One of the professors is addicted to "Volxemortserum," whatever the hell that is.
- - Two more of the professors (McGongall and Snape) attempt to rape Ebooby and Draco, at least when Snape and his sidepiece, Remus Lupin, aren't spying on everyone or "masticating" at the sight of Egberty taking a bath.
- - Draco may actually be imprisoned by Voldemort, who's cleverly disguised himself as the lead singer of the band My Chemical Romance.
- - Enobly goes back in time to stop Voldemort, who's also Satan, who was formerly in a 1980's band with the Marauders and Lucius Malfoy.
- - Along the way she meets Marty McFly from the Back to the Future movies, who gives her a nifty combination DeLorean/time machine/iPod.
- - The entire mess ends with Ebonic Tara yelling "Avada Kedavra!" during an Epic Battle in the totally Goth'd out Great Hall.
Needless to say, such incoherence did not go unnoticed. Before XXXbloodyrists666XXX finally got sick of the whole mess and yanked it from FanFiction.Net, between eight and ten thousand amused, appalled, and enraged Potter fans had commented on "My Immortal." They weren't alone, either. "My Immortal" was such an epic stinker that it was discussed, attacked, and flensed according to the "this is how you render a whale" chapters in Moby-Dick on TV Tropes, Something Awful, God knows how many LiveJournal communities, and YouTube.
It's little wonder that IO9 called "My Immortal" a "masterpiece of weirdness," or that authors, critics, and academics seeking to characterize fanfic as a legitimate literary form have to explain it away somehow. It's little wonder that a great many people have wondered whether it was a satire on bad fanfic written by a good author, or just plain bad in its own right.
Thanks to the anonymity afforded by most fanfic archives, that question went unanswered for close to a decade. Oh, there was speculation - XXXbloodyrists666XXX mentioned a friend named "Raven" in her copious and incoherent notes, which should have helped but didn't since a surprisingly number of fans used some variation on "Raven" as a handle - but beyond an association with someone calling herself "Tara Gilesbie," all attempts to identify XXXbloodyrists666XXX ended in failure.
That is, until children's book author Rose Christo claimed to be "My Immortal's" co-author in March of 2017.
No one paid my attention - a lot of younger fans had never heard of "My Immortal" and most older fans didn't much care - but then Christo made the same claim a few months later on a blog associated with Tara Gilesbie. Just why anyone would want to be known as the perpetrator of "My Immortal" isn't clear, but Christo seemed determined to do so.
This second post should have been enough to make Rose Christo, who stated that she was part Cree and had survived being separated from her family and brought up in the foster care system, Internet famous, at least for a little while. Alas, soon after Christo outed herself as Tara Gilesbie, another children's book author named Lani Sarem tried to get her self-published book Handbook for Mortals onto the best seller lists by drastically inflating the sales figures. How Sarem did this is a tale for another diary, but as soon as people actually began downloading her book they spotted several startling similarities to "My Immortal."
Sarem never tried to claim credit for "My Immortal" - she had her own problems at that point - but Christo immediately wrote on her Tumblr that no, Sarem had not written The Worst Fanfic Ever. Nor was Christo herself Sarem, nor had she ever written under that name. She, however, announce that her memoir, Under the Same Stars: the Search for My Brother and the True Story of My Immortal would be published soon by Macmillan, who had received proof that yes, Christo had written "My Immortal" when she was a lonely, neglected foster kid as a satire of bad fanfiction.
Macmillan confirmed that they had vetted Christo's story and believed her; in addition to the manuscript of Under the Same Stars, she'd given them the email she'd used to create her old FanFiction.Net account, plus a flash drive containing the original, unedited draft of the first eleven chapters of "My Immortal." Fandom, shocked that one of its greatest mysteries was about to be solved, sat up, took notice, and waited for Under the Same Stars to be published.
And then, just weeks before Under the Same Stars came out, Christo's brother doxxed her on the notorious troll/doxxing site Kiwi Forum. Worse, he had rock-solid proof that Rose Christo's birth name was "Theresa Rose Christopoulos," and that she had fabricated most of her background.
Whether she'd written "My Immortal" or not, Christo's brother couldn't say. He could confirm that she'd spent much of her adolescence mocking bad fanfiction so she certainly could have co-written "My Immortal," but as to whether she'd actually done so, he had no idea. All he knew was that she'd faked much of her memoir, and that could not stand.
Christo, whose world had basically exploded on her with the force of an extra-strength Avada Kedavra, once again insisted that she was indeed the author of "My Immortal." She did, however, concede that a) she'd been doxxed by her own brother, b) that most of what he said was correct, and c) she'd changed much of her story to protect her family's identity.
Alas for Rose Christo/Theresa Christopoulous, Harry Potter fans, and the literary world in general, Macmillan sided with her brother and cancelled publication of Under the Same Stars. The entire run was withdrawn, the copies pulped, and if any of you with publishing connections actually see a copy at a tag sale, in a remainder bin, or elsewhere, buy it at once, since it would more than qualify as a collector's item and literary rarity.
As for "My Immortal" itself, XXXbloodyrists666XXX aka Tara Gilesbie aka Rose Christo aka just possibly Lanie Sarem took the original down years ago. But thanks to the wonders of the Internet, someone else re-archived it, so the curious can take a look
here. Whether it's a satire, a genuinely bad fic by someone who had no idea of what she was doing, or something else, is not for me to say.
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Have you ever heard of “My Immortal”? Heard the song? Called yourself “Vampire Potter”? Dyed the tips of your long black hair red? Now’s the time to admit it, so spill….
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