Radom thoughts….
Most know my online persona ‘the-diva’ and her infamy in fanfiction writing. While musing over my next blog update, I came across one from my Diva site, and decided to share. It explains a lot as to where my writing session began, and why it continues….
It’s 4 am and I can’t sleep. Is that news to you? Probably not. Those of you that chat with me online know that the birth, maintenance, and devotion I have for my fanfic is just a bastard child of my insomnia. So yes, at times like these I sit back and reflect on what I’ve done and what I plan to do. (story wise that is) However, tonight I’m not sure I’m necessarily feeling it. Yeah the Diva is my alter ego and she is a jovan slut (John and Evangeline off of One Life to Live) all the way, but at my heart and hers we are writers so the greatest expression of our passion is our shared compulsion to entertain. That’s what Battaglia (my latest mafia fanfic story) is supposed to be, pure and simple…..entertainment.
When I first started writing fan fiction in all honesty it was because I was angry.
Mad at a stupid soap.
Mad at fictional characters.
Mad at dumb internet message board posters.
Blah Blah Blah. Before fanfic I had a pretty active social life. Traveled, partied, dated, the whole nine. But my insomnia and compulsive ways always left me with unspent energy at the end of the day. So yep, I got sucked into the soap fandom world. A world I never really knew existed. I’m 36 and by far not a new viewer of soaps. I started watching soap operas with my granny at the age of six. I remember sitting at her knee learning that a poll dancer with a penchant for wealthy impotent men….can hit jackpot if she managed to shake her booty in front of a millionaire (Victor Newman). Cheating on her then hubby and passing off the Newman heir as his baby, would be rewarded by becoming a wealthy woman of means through marriage (Young and the Restless). It was an alternate world. EVERYTHING in it was exaggerated and even as a youngun….I was digging that. Sick huh? LOL!
Growing up as a latch-key kid I would come home from school at the age of 9 holding my little sister hand who was 6, and set us up for the evening. My elementary school was three blocks away, and this was before parents were in tune with the dangers of psychos roaming the streets waiting to snatch their babies.
So there I was a product of a single parent home with a mother that taught day and night school barely making $35K trying to cover an inflated mortgage during the Regan years. Nope, I didn’t have Joan Clever waiting with fresh baked cookies for me at the end of the day.
What I did have was TV. And what a teacher it was! I’d run home, change my little sister clothes, then mine and fix us bowls of cereal so we could sit down and watch SOAPS. You know on the kind of TV that you used a wire hanger for an antenna, and you had to get up change the dial to UHF then the lower dial to the higher numbers to get in the station? Some of you know what I’m talking about.
At the age of 9 I didn’t understand half of what I was seeing but for me it was far more entertaining than Sesame Street. My little sister however, didn’t agree.
Then life went on. I grew up, with Soaps always in the background, just something to watch when out for spring or summer break. Mildly entertaining and becoming just a habit. Even as a college student, I can remember standing in line laughing with my sorority sisters and filling out my registration for next quarter. Every class I took had to be worked around my favorite soaps. Yep, even if it was a required course and only offered that one time. Given the choice I’d take an elective hands down. Yes! That was the pattern and for the life of me as bad of a habit as it was, I don’t remember when it became an obsession. Or maybe I do, let me revisit that thought in a minute.
Here is where it differed. Back then, when a soap character pissed me off. I tuned it out, and picked another show to watch. There was an average of three to watch at any given chosen hour so it wasn’t hard. When a soap character was killed off or left for greener pastures. (For example I was a Steve and Bestsie fan for ATWT. Meg Ryan played Betsie and I was disappointed when she left…..no recast ever took her place) But when an actress left I just shrugged it off and found something else to enjoy. After all it was a soap right?
Then it happened. I had to fly to a little town in the middle of nowhere to deal with a client that had some issues I won’t bore you with. Stuck in a hotel that didn’t even have cable, I flipped on the TV and saw John and Evangeline. It was the Valentines day scene. When she serenaded him. I watched it curiously and true to nature got pulled back in. Was I a fanatic? Nope….just thought the characters seemed interesting. First time I saw a black woman featured with a white leading man. A woman that was allowed to showcase her sexuality, and command a scene. A woman that was fair skin but chocolate like me. A woman that was simply allowed to be.
Well later that night I popped open my lap top and decided to go online to kill boredom. I stumbled over to a message board to read more on the character.
That’s when I ran dead smack into the SOAPWARS. Whew were they ugly. The poor actress was called some vile disgusting things, but there was also a fanbase that fought back with everything in them.
It was initially weird that a soap character would evoke emotion to this degree either good or bad. I mean we were a country at war. Terrorism is supposed to be at our door. That idiot Bush just got put back in office and here we were ready to kill each other because a white male lead slept with a black supporting actress and it actually worked? Color me dumb….but it was beyond ridiculous.
And you know what. Instead of doing what I’ve done for years as a TV viewer I did something else. Created a username and password then jumped in feet first. Attacking those that attacked a character whose actress name I didn’t even know. Man was it ugly.
There I was a college educated woman with a masters degree in computer science, the only black female manager in my division, behaving like a 12 year old who just found out they weren’t getting their favorite Christmas toy. I actually hated a fictional character on TV so much her face made me ill. Embarrassed much? Ah yeah…I tried telling ONE girlfriend of my new obsession called JOVAN and she made me repeat the story to her THREE times. LOL! First she didn’t understand when I had the time and second she didn’t understand why I spent the time. But I couldn’t let it go. I joined yahoo groups, watched all the old clips on websites. Went over to other soap boards waving the JOVAN flag…..you name it I did it all.
Then I found fanfiction.
I sat on the Swept Away website tapping my fingers waiting impatiently for an update. Went to the fanfiction archive, read every single story but those divas were even slower. Watched my couple get ripped apart and my fave actually burned at the stake for dare to love a man that’s supposed to be for a character not fit to clean toilets. Stuck with the inability to sleep and a job that was growing even more stressful, compounded by a recent breakup that left me shell shocked I needed some release.
So I opened up Microsoft Word and started to type….
I mean I could do this right? I have two degrees for Christ sake, I should be able to write a story?????! I’ve written all my life, a drabble or novel for that matter should be a piece of cake! Wrong!
I struggled and I struggled. I wanted to tell the story in my head and I wanted to badly. So I pumped out chapters daily. Each day I learned a new syntax or something to make the story work. Was I successful? I don’t know…..I didn’t do it for those reasons I did it for my soap couple. I wanted that damn couple so bad I wrote and wrote every plausible way their love story could be told. But darn it, it just wasn’t meant to be. And after a while I had to let go. As child puts up her favorite toy. I turned to writing fantasy stories. With John and Evangeline as my muse.
Well now I’m getting to the point. These stories were original and different but obsessively centered on a ‘the perfect love’. A love with out restrictions and rules. Yes she was a black woman, yes he was a white man, but that wasn’t the story. The LOVE the love was the same color as any other, and that is where the story lied.
I wanted to grow as a writer now based on the fandom I was getting from my fellow readers. And the beat went on. Now why did I just regurgitate all that?
Because sitting here in the darkness reading reviews and thinking of the next chapter, I had to reflect on the most popular story I’ve written to date. I’ve created what I’ve loved all my life. A SOAP.
So everything about it is SOAPY…..except I used a gangster theme to keep it going. Yes, in my alternate universe every man wants the Donna, and every woman wants the Don. They can kill and maime along the way but at the end of the day their love is impenetrable. Those around them will crash and burn but from the ashes only these two will survive. In true soap fashion, drama awaits them around every corner. But each time they overcome it.
From reading what some of you wrote I hear in your voice the same frustrations I had when I was obsessively possessed by my soap couple (shhh…still am). I get agitated, frustrated, aggravated, irritated at the criticism because selfishly I want you to see them as I do. Which is ironic, because the crap that these head writers for daytime TV write may be based on the same premises.
What does it all mean?
It means that Battaglia Mafia Series is a SOAP SAGA….and if it is to continue it will remain very soapy! What I write or Diva writes is always the fantasy. It means that the Don will not be defeated and the Donna will not be cheated, but others will suffer to tell their story. It means that I don’t have pesty networks breathing down my back. It means that I like you only want to be entertained.
Well I’m done…
Those are my random thoughts. Because I’m still that same nine year old girl with her baby-sister sitting next to her, eating cereal out of a celery green tupperware bowl, watching Guiding Light and wondering if REVA would get out of that fountain and help Josh walk again. Ha! Soaps…..god help us all!
Divas Kisses
T.
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"Sigmund Freud once said, "What do women want?" The only thing I have learned in fifty-two years is that women want men to stop asking dumb questions like that."by Bill Cosby
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