Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Confession – My Mom Used to Do FanFic

My sister and her husband were down from the Bay Area this weekend. We had dinner on Saturday and spent Sunday afternoon in the living room at my house just talking, killing time before their flight. I had TCM on with the sound down real low, and no one was really watching, but I think having an old movie on in the background made her think of something she might not have otherwise. My sister told me something about our mom that I didn't know before.

It turns out my mom was so upset by the ending of the book, Gone with the Wind, that she wrote a final chapter that ended of the story the way she thought it should have ended. Doing the math, my mom would have been about 9 going on 10 when the novel, Gone with the Wind, was first published. I'm assuming she was a little bit older, maybe 13 to 16 when she wrote it.

She hung onto it for years to come, but unfortunately ended up throwing it out when she and my dad moved the family out from Kansas to California in the mid-1950s. I would have loved to read it. The upshot to this is that my mom was writing FanFic about half a century before they even had a name for it. I'm not saying my mom was a pioneer or anything. I'm sure lots of girls did that sort of thing back when. Still, it's kind of cool.

No comments:

Post a Comment