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So last night I came home at 11:30 PM . . . and realized that I had left my apartment keys in my desk at work! :D! (:/)
Three calls to my roommate got absolutely no response, and lurking sketchily in the Dunkin' Donuts for an hour in hopes of seeing someone enter the building also yielded no results, so eventually I gave up and called my mom (Beccamom: mffzzwhatyessureyoucancomesleephe...*SNORE*) and then fought my way back through the subway system to her apartment. Fun self-awareness fact: normally I do not think of myself as particularly irritable, but apparently I am HAIR-TRIGGER when locked out of my apartment, as proven by all the times I passed by groups of cheerful girls letting out high-pitched shrieks of giggling at regular intervals and had to fight down the urge to DESTROY DESTROY. This is especially hypocritical considering all the times I have been that shrieking girl on the subway, as any of you who have had occasion to take a subway with me know. Anyway, now I am at work, in my mother's clothing, trying valiantly to feel human and like a productive member of society and actually do work instead of glaring across the city at my roommate, who forwarded a cheery e-mail to me this morning about swing-dancing in the park and made no mention of the messages I left on her phone last night going "WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU." Because it is not really her fault that I am an idiot. (The most frustrating part was that I had actually been doing quite well at getting back into the groove of making myself write a page a day this whole week! And now my streak is broken.)
But you know what helps with feeling human and cheery and non-rageful (if not necessarily productive?) Canonical fanfic! I have been rereading some of the kid's books I have fond memories of when I was small, and they are both hilarious examples of self-insert fanfiction in the most literal sense.
Edward Eager's Knight's Castle is most blatant, and most awesome. It involves four cousins who find that their playset is magic and transports them to knight-fantasy-land in the middle of the night to have ADVENTURES. Moreover, they have just seen Ivanhoe, they have set up their playset with an Ivanhoe theme, and that means the whole book basically becomes hilarious Ivanhoe fanfic. (Fun fact: the only reason I know the plot of Ivanhoe at all is because of this book.) Seriously, you can run down a checklist of fanfic tropes:
- Self-inserts! Everyone thinks the four kids are amazing magical saviours, especially the main boy, whom they all insist on calling The Great Roger
- Shipfic with noncanon pairings! Edward Eager is a HUGE Rebecca/Ivanhoe shipper, and therefore so are all the kids, who just Do Not Get the Rowena thing, so a significant theme of the book is "REBECCA RULES! ROWENA DROOLS!" ("Rebecca helped him by tripping up any who would attack from the rear, and Rowena helped him by turning away and holding her ears.")
- Wacky AU! At one point, after they've added some things to their playset, the kids get into Ivanhoe-land and find that it's become ridiculously modernized, all the knights are getting in traffic accidents, and Ivanhoe is hanging out reading science fiction and planning rocketships
- Redeem the hot villain! Edward Eager also thinks Brian de Bois-Guilbert is pretty awesome. So he sticks him in a perilous situation with Ivanhoe and Rebecca and they all become BFF!
- Implausible crossover! Basically the whole thing is a giant crossover between Ivanhoe and E. Nesbit's The Magic City (Edward Eager: "NO SERIOUSLY IT WORKS I SWEAR")
- Also, this is not a fanfic trope nor is it something that's actually possible given that the book was written probably before the Dark is Rising, but IN MY HEAD it is totally a Dark is Rising crossover too. The magic soldier that starts everything off and teaches them Valuable Wisdoms is a grumpy man with white hair who is known only as the Old One! okay yes maybe the mental image of Merriman as a toy soldier fills me with a little too much hilarity BUT STILL.
Anne Lindbergh's Travel Far, Pay No Fare is less hilariously fanfiction-y, but even more wish-fulfillment-y - the premise is that two soon-to-be-stepsiblings find a magic bookmark that lets them go into books! This was my childhood DREAM, guys. Awesomely, mostly they use it to go into YA books featuring Prominently Dead Pets and rescue them from being dead. (Including the canary in Little Women, which our teenaged-boy narrator protests loudly at having to visit until he gets a crush on Amy.) Also hilarious is the fact that the protagonist's mother is basically a Lurlene McDaniels Lite who writes books like "I Didn't Ask For Asthma."
SO BASICALLY, these books give me hope that really all you have to do to be a beloved YA author is write cracked-out self-insert fic about other books. In which case, I have totally found my career calling!
Three calls to my roommate got absolutely no response, and lurking sketchily in the Dunkin' Donuts for an hour in hopes of seeing someone enter the building also yielded no results, so eventually I gave up and called my mom (Beccamom: mffzzwhatyessureyoucancomesleephe...*SNORE*) and then fought my way back through the subway system to her apartment. Fun self-awareness fact: normally I do not think of myself as particularly irritable, but apparently I am HAIR-TRIGGER when locked out of my apartment, as proven by all the times I passed by groups of cheerful girls letting out high-pitched shrieks of giggling at regular intervals and had to fight down the urge to DESTROY DESTROY. This is especially hypocritical considering all the times I have been that shrieking girl on the subway, as any of you who have had occasion to take a subway with me know. Anyway, now I am at work, in my mother's clothing, trying valiantly to feel human and like a productive member of society and actually do work instead of glaring across the city at my roommate, who forwarded a cheery e-mail to me this morning about swing-dancing in the park and made no mention of the messages I left on her phone last night going "WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU." Because it is not really her fault that I am an idiot. (The most frustrating part was that I had actually been doing quite well at getting back into the groove of making myself write a page a day this whole week! And now my streak is broken.)
But you know what helps with feeling human and cheery and non-rageful (if not necessarily productive?) Canonical fanfic! I have been rereading some of the kid's books I have fond memories of when I was small, and they are both hilarious examples of self-insert fanfiction in the most literal sense.
Edward Eager's Knight's Castle is most blatant, and most awesome. It involves four cousins who find that their playset is magic and transports them to knight-fantasy-land in the middle of the night to have ADVENTURES. Moreover, they have just seen Ivanhoe, they have set up their playset with an Ivanhoe theme, and that means the whole book basically becomes hilarious Ivanhoe fanfic. (Fun fact: the only reason I know the plot of Ivanhoe at all is because of this book.) Seriously, you can run down a checklist of fanfic tropes:
- Self-inserts! Everyone thinks the four kids are amazing magical saviours, especially the main boy, whom they all insist on calling The Great Roger
- Shipfic with noncanon pairings! Edward Eager is a HUGE Rebecca/Ivanhoe shipper, and therefore so are all the kids, who just Do Not Get the Rowena thing, so a significant theme of the book is "REBECCA RULES! ROWENA DROOLS!" ("Rebecca helped him by tripping up any who would attack from the rear, and Rowena helped him by turning away and holding her ears.")
- Wacky AU! At one point, after they've added some things to their playset, the kids get into Ivanhoe-land and find that it's become ridiculously modernized, all the knights are getting in traffic accidents, and Ivanhoe is hanging out reading science fiction and planning rocketships
- Redeem the hot villain! Edward Eager also thinks Brian de Bois-Guilbert is pretty awesome. So he sticks him in a perilous situation with Ivanhoe and Rebecca and they all become BFF!
- Implausible crossover! Basically the whole thing is a giant crossover between Ivanhoe and E. Nesbit's The Magic City (Edward Eager: "NO SERIOUSLY IT WORKS I SWEAR")
- Also, this is not a fanfic trope nor is it something that's actually possible given that the book was written probably before the Dark is Rising, but IN MY HEAD it is totally a Dark is Rising crossover too. The magic soldier that starts everything off and teaches them Valuable Wisdoms is a grumpy man with white hair who is known only as the Old One! okay yes maybe the mental image of Merriman as a toy soldier fills me with a little too much hilarity BUT STILL.
Anne Lindbergh's Travel Far, Pay No Fare is less hilariously fanfiction-y, but even more wish-fulfillment-y - the premise is that two soon-to-be-stepsiblings find a magic bookmark that lets them go into books! This was my childhood DREAM, guys. Awesomely, mostly they use it to go into YA books featuring Prominently Dead Pets and rescue them from being dead. (Including the canary in Little Women, which our teenaged-boy narrator protests loudly at having to visit until he gets a crush on Amy.) Also hilarious is the fact that the protagonist's mother is basically a Lurlene McDaniels Lite who writes books like "I Didn't Ask For Asthma."
SO BASICALLY, these books give me hope that really all you have to do to be a beloved YA author is write cracked-out self-insert fic about other books. In which case, I have totally found my career calling!