the twisty paths of fandom

I am awash in nostalgia right now. I'm sorting through some old zines with an eye to selling and/or donating a bunch of them, and came across my copy of Twogether, the Due South zine that was the sequel to Two, both put out by IIBNF Press.

Due South was my first real zine fandom, such as it was; my first zines were ST:TOS, but I only had a handful, bought used out of a box at a dealer's room at an SF convention back in the mid-80s.

But after I got online and found FK fandom (omg people other than me watched FK! and taped it! and talked about it! *\o/*), I found out about DS fandom. I'd been watching DS since the pilot movie, and loved it, and was over the moon to realize it had a fandom. It even had a slash fandom!

It even had slash ZINES. omg.

So somewhere around 1995, I ordered my first-ever brand-new zine. I'm pretty sure it was Cry Wolf, from Ann O'Neill in England. I had to wrap up my cash very carefully to mail it off, and I had no idea if it'd made it until a month or two later, when suddenly there was a package for me, with a digest-sized zine full of Fraser/Ray stories. A (tiny) book of Fraser/Ray stories! It was to swoon.

I was hooked. I bought the next Cry Wolf, and two volumes of Pack Mates, all from England, and hey all of a sudden, I was a real zine fan! I had a collection.

And then Bernice advertised Two, and I bought it, and wow. It was amazing. Twice as thick as the Pack Mates zines, beautifully laid out, chock full of stories, like my old ST zines. I was still very much in my fannish honeymoon phase, and read pretty much anything and thought it was all good, but my memory of that zine is that it was aces. I mean - how can a zine with fuzzy stickers of moose in it not be awesome? (I'm not kidding. Random fuzzy stickers. I loved that zine so much.)

It even inspired me to write my first-ever LOC to a zine; I'd sent comments to online writers before, but I'd learned that part of the deal with zines was that if you read one, you were supposed to send a LOC. So after I finished it, I wrote... the stupidest LOC ever. *g* I had no idea what I was doing!

And it's not that I remember writing the stupidest LOC ever; I'd completely forgotten that I LOCed the zine, and if I had remembered, I probably would have thought that I wrote something reasonably coherent and useful.

But (here's where I tie in the first paragraph) tonight, when I looked at my copy of Twogether - the sequel to Two, remember? - I flipped through it to the back, where the letters of comment were, and there's my name. omg. (I had the same omg reaction when I got the zine, thinking back; for some reason, I hadn't expected the letters to be printed. *facepalm* I'd thought Bernice would just pass the feedback along to the authors. Total newbie, me.)

None of which is what triggered this post.

What triggered this post was looking at the other letters, and having a jawdrop moment. See, some of the names in there I remember from back then. Most I don't. Three in particular, I don't.

One right after the other, I saw letters from sakana17, sherrold, and movies_michelle -- all women I became friends with a few years later via other fandom means, and whom I'm still friends with. (*waves!*) And there we all were, sitting in the same LOC column together in 1997, in a zine printed in Australia and shipped halfway 'round the world.

I really love seeing how far back fannish connections actually go. <3

(Also, man, DS was some kind of mega-vector. Freakish.)