Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Backstory

Generally speaking, I believe fan fiction to be a lower, vulgar art form. Yet sometimes I enjoy engaging in it in-between more serious projects. It's campy fun that can keep the writing muscles in shape without taxing the brain. Sure you can't legally make money off them, but who wants to write for profit all the time anyway? (OK, me too, but...)

The jewel of this collection is a series of Transformers fanfics from 1997-1998 called "The Skyfire Adventures." The Transformer toy Jetfire--based on a Robotech Veritech fighter--was my favorite Transformer of all time. In fact, I still have the one I originally received for Christmas in 1985 and in 1996 bought one still mint in the box. Anyway, as I was in college and didn't want to do anything serious and the surging popularity of the Web allowed me to connect with Transformers fans all over the world, many of whom had written their own stories, I wrote a whole novel called "Transformers: Xenophobia" and then followed it up with a series of shorter, unrelated fanfics.

It was intended to be over a dozen parts, but I only did the first seven and then wrapped it up . Those stories blend the Transformers universe of the 1980s with the new Beast Wars series of the mid-1990s. In it, our hero the Autobot Jetfire--now a Maximal called Skyfire, which was his name in the '80s TV series because of copyright issues--ends up on remote world where he finds a crashed shuttle with several Autobots in suspended animation. They then explore the galaxy on their way back home and have a variety of strange and exciting adventures--mostly strange, especially the last one.

There's also a Star Trek: Voyager fanfic and a couple others that aren't really fanfics but they fit better here than the regular short story collection.

The links are on the right side. Please enjoy all those juicy tidbits of fanfic...