TBR Mountain? Meet TBR Universe

So if you've been reading here for any length of time, I hope you know enough about me to know that I am an avid reader myself. Of everything. And anything - shampoo bottles, literary tomes, complicated scientific articles, every kind of novel ever (romance, sci-fi, fantasy, crime, thriller, YA...), obscure biographies, how-to books, and so much more. But up until last week I had avoided getting entangled with fanfiction.

My reasoning was not snobbish - I do not consider any kind of reading to be better than any other, after all, and a person who takes immense joy in selecting picture books as presents for people of all ages has very little in to say about other people's reading choices. If you like it; it's worth reading, is my basic reading philosophy. (Which does not mean, if I don't like what you're reading that I'm not going to find some way to build a literary bridge between your (poor) taste and mine, because, really if you like fairy tale retellings, I can find 72 better fairy tale retellings than the one you are reading and then we can talk about it and fangirl together, and won't that be more fun? Yes: yes it will.) Like every reader, I do have issues of personal taste when it comes to books - things that make a good book amazing, subplots I have had enough of, characters I wish would show up more, things that make a good plot go bad - but I'm no literary snob (despite the English Lit department's best efforts).

No: my reasons for abstention from fanfiction were varied & personal  -

•  A) I didn't know a lot about it, except that it's not always finished & I HATE waiting for things to be finished*;
•  B) some of the pieces I had wandered upon were ... poorly written/edited/solely smut (not that there's anything wrong with that except for - ) 
• C) I tend to have my own head canons about things - certain favorite characters, primarily - and I don't like to see those get messed up and
•  D) the sheer amount of reading material I already have on my plate & an unwillingness to open the Pandora's box of literally ever written character I've ever fallen for having an infinite number of more stories told about them.

But - even with these well-thought out & well-intentioned self-preservation techniques in place - I threw it all out the window one day last week when I started reading a phenomenal Avenger's Fanfiction series. Which I found completely by accident, and which I am very upset there are not more stories in. (See star below.)

But, as often always happens in reading - one thing leads to another and here I am, a week later, having barely put a dent in the multi-verses of fanfiction that's out there, but having a ton of non-canon Avenger feels and ignoring all my other reading responsibilities. 

Literally - I barely have read anything else in a week, and that's unusual for me, because I've always got three-four things going concurrently.  In this case, however, if I don't want to be reading Avenger fanfic, I can just switch over to Sherlock or GoT or virtually any other thing I am even the tiniest bit interested in. Not to mention crossovers. (No seriously: let's not mention them because I maaaaaaaaaaaaaay have spent an entire day and a half stuck in the MCU, and now I'm mad that the Avengers, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four don't all play together in the movies, because of stupid studios.)

There is fanfiction for everything, and for a person who reads as much as I do, this is Very. Dangerous. Information. Favorite author fan fic; favorite character fan fic; favorite book series/movie/television series fan fic; I don't play video games, but if I did? Fan fic.

And it was somewhere between the Nora Roberts/GoT crossover fanfic and the Star Trek reboot fan fic where Bones was finally getting his due that I realized something - some of the first things I ever wrote were fan fic. The Little Women retcon  FIX where Laurie does not end up with whiny Amy and Jo does not marry a professor we know very little about. The Tiny Toons Adventure scripts where they got to hang out with the Animaniacs. The alternate ending to It (spoiler alert) where Bev - who is 11! - doesn't decide to have sex with her friends for no goddamn reason, just because they're lost in the freaking sewers and Stephen King didn't know how to get them out of there without being a creep. (I was 11, and I can guarantee you that it would not have entered my mind to lead the group out of the tunnel that way.  Even if I was a slow learner - and I'll admit I was - 11??? Also: I still think that was a shitty thing to do.)

I've been re-writing endings (And middles.  And beginnings.) of stories since I started reading them.** And while I am extremely relieved that publishing as I was writing was not an option for me (although it may have been and I just... don't share what I'm writing, so it's likely that never would have happened anyways), I'm so glad that the Internet has introduced me to YET ANOTHER group of my people.

I can only rue the fact that it did not include some wormhole that enables me to read while also accomplishing other things, or an extra 52 hours in a day, so that I can devote them solely to reading and actually accomplish something else. As always, there is just so much more to read, and so little time to actually do it.

The sacrifices to readers (and writers) make. ;)



*Please see: Actual Comic Books, a literary art form that I truly love, but only in retrospect. I do not appreciate a bi-weekly serial. I do not like the cliffhanger versions of stories where I'm supposed to wait to find out if favorite characters survive. I get enough of that in my television watching, thank you very much. And also in my book series reading, which I both love and hate: Love spending so much time with characters and revisiting them, hate having to wait for the next book to come out. Am not patient about this, for some reason.  (And this is why I have a half-year's worth of Batgirl comics to catch up on: because I want to be able to read them all in one gulp.)

** One of the many books my mother saved from my childhood is a revision of The Monster at the End of this Book, the first book I remember reading out loud by myself, the first book I loved, as a reader. So, the fact that I then did my own version of it, way back when, suggests I was a little slow to pickup on the whole "fan fiction is for you, you dope."

So this happened...

For a serious Jeopardy geek like me, that's a big deal.  In my family? We're not just game players, we're game show players - always have been. (Not all of us - half of my sisters, for example, roll their eyes when I turn it on, used to say "I don't need to watch school stuff after school." But that's OK. I still love them.)  But for those of us who are game show players? Jeopardy is it.

I started watching Jeopardy at my grandparents house sometime before I was 8 years old: I only know that because the first time I beat my Grandfather at a game, I was eight, and by then we'd been watching for years. Every night we were at their house, at 7:30 (except for the unfortunate years that the local channel decided to switch up the routine and but it on at 7:00, before Wheel of Fortune, which - if my Grandmother was any judge - was tantamount to trying to put the New Testament before the Old), everybody who wasn't currently doing the dishes or putting a baby to sleep would congregate in my grandparents living room and watch the show. Over the course of the last twenty-however-many or so years, that specific combination of people has included - at various different and/or overlapping points:

My brother and I - fresh from baths, tucked into our pajamas and with backs eager for scratching - sitting at my grandmother's feet; my Uncle Mark,  who had Down Syndrome, sitting in his rocking chair, thumping along to the music and waiting for the end of the show when someone would tell him it was time to get ready for bed, at which point he'd stand in the doorway and say "Good. Night. Mum. Good. Night. Jack." and so on, until each of us had been properly bid farewell; any number of my other uncles, usually found stretched across the floor, one pillow propped underneath their head, quiet enough so that you'd think they weren't paying attention, until the game started and the answers questions would pop lazily out of their mouths; my grandfather, always at his end of the couch, tucked into his corner, probably also listening to either the ballgame or classical music, and most likely working on an embroidery project or crossword puzzle at the same time - he was another one you didn't think would be much competition - with all that noise, how could anybody concentrate? - but he beat me 4 nights out of 5; various cousins on various holidays or school trips or summer vacations, nights when we'd file in from the front porch only long enough to watch the game, laugh about the sports questions I missed or the ballet questions my cousin and I had smoked everyone else on, and then file back out to sit with the mosquitoes until it was time for bed; and, of course, my grandmother - especially during those later years when I would stay with her and it would be just she and I, it seemed Jeopardy, Judge Judy, & NCIS were the only shows that she could tolerate - and both Judy and Gibbs were questionable.

I can think of a million different configurations of my Grandmother's living room, and a million different Jeopardy games we watched from any of them. We watched in the summer, with the windows open and the screens down, so that you could still hear kids playing outside on the street, or all bundled up under blankets or hovering over her heating vents in the winter.  We were watching one Friday night when the house across the street burned down - although, to be fair, we did also, you know, pay attention to the fire. We watched last September, after we lost her, when that room was as cold as I've ever felt it, and that house was as empty as is has ever been - I sat with my sister and my aunts, none of us really paying much attention, but it was enough to have it on, enough that every now and then, we were distracted enough to give an answer.  I've watched with my uncle since then, in the new quiet, the new normal of the house, at least Jeopardy, and a cup of tea and a couple of cookies seems familiar.  I watched by myself, there and here, in tears, more than once, thinking about her and how something so ridiculous as a game of answers and questions can bring her back to me so clearly, how I can almost hear her still sighing over the loss of Alex's mustache, or some 'doofus's' incorrect response.

And it wasn't just there - I played Jeopardy with my mom and my other grandmother the summer I was in the hospital, and then bed bound - we'd keep score and add our tallies, spent the whole summer trying to beat each other, and I have no idea who actually one, but I know my Nana - one of the smartest people I knew - was a horrible wagerer and came in last.  I played with the girls in my dorm at college, my roommate and I would watch while we gobbled down Chinese food or macaroni and cheese from the hot pot in between our day classes and our night classes. And now I have to schedule my phone calls with my 13-yr-old nephew so as not to run over into Jeopardy time, because he plays with the boy down the street (although he plays with an ap somehow? and that makes me feel very old).

Anyways. I can you could see that this would be important to me.  And - of course - because I used my blog twitter instead of my personal twitter, I can't tell my family about it... but I figured you guys would understand.  I mean if you can't talk about being a total quiz show nerd on the Internet, where can you talk about it?

By the way; the poem that they quoted? My Grandmother's favorite (and not coincidentally one of the last things she remembered almost to the very end)?  From the category Lit-Tree-Ture : This self-described "fool" wrote, "a tree that looks at God all day / and lifts her leafy arms to pray".  The contestant answered incorrectly.  Here's the correct answer, and the complete poem:

119. Trees

I THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,	5
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.	10
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

                                                                                        Joyce Kilmer. 1886–1918