Fanfiction and Original Creative Writings, my trip down memory lane.

Fanfiction, we're all read at least one of these works of a fan's exploration of a fictional universe at some point no doubt. Some of us have even tried our hand at it while others have no taste for it in any regard. It represents a way for fans to show their own take on a fictional universe and characters and maybe even take them down routes we would never see the show runners or writers allow. Way back in the late 90's and early noughties I too tried my hand at it, with mixed results.

In was in 1997 I found myself having access to the internet for the first time thanks to the miracle of dial up. Man, that seems so far away both in terms of time and technology. I knew what I wanted to find first and having found one of those things called a "search engine" (possibly Alta Vista, more likely Yahoo) I put in my first ever search term.

"Star Trek"

Having been bombarded with websites that promised "real" nude pics of the various actresses, and having found that most of them were really just their heads (and a lot of their male co-stars) photoshopped onto the bodies of some very nimble porn stars, and even seeing some similar images involving the cast of (of all things) Friends playing naked twister, I decided I'd better try adding some more specific terms. And being all of 17 at the time of course I did what you think I was doing when I saw those images.
I cleared my cache.

"Star Trek" and "humour" seemed a much better choice, and I was quickly deluged with various fanfiction and parodies and even write ups or transcripts of TV shows scripts on the matter. Jim Careys Saturday night live skits? Check. Various fan art and cosplayers of the time? Check. Fanfiction where Kirk and Spock check each others plumbing? Check...

I found quite a lot of  fanfiction, one stand out was "Star Traks" an original series of comedy fanfiction set in the Star Trek universe with an all original cast of characters and settings that mostly parodied the settings and crew of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and having various spin off series in it's own right and a loyal fandom. Sadly, I've not yet ben able to locate any websites hosting these as part of my write up of days gone by but I live and hope.

But I also found "The Slightly Warped Website", which also had Star Trek based parodies that were using the classic characters from the various shows, but also branched out into Star Wars, The X-Files, Sliders (a show I was not familiar with but soon would be) and it's own movie reviews, all written with the same humorous style and wit and had quite a lot of content to wade through while fighting back tears of laughter.

I felt inspired, writing was always something I'd wanted to try my hand at, I had dreams of becoming an author (not a dream yet achieved but I am working on it) and I knew to be one I needed to practise and this site was encouraging me to try, while also trying my hand at comedy, not something I had really tried to emulate in any of my schools English coursework over the years, so here was a new avenue to try.
And best of all, the site was willing to take submissions.

Obviously not for payment, this was fanfiction after all, this was for the love of the show and the fandom and to test one self. And in any case this was way before the days of google ads and I don't think YouTube was even a dream at that point, Google itself was something I would only become aware in the then far off future space year of 2000. Man, that really was a long time ago now.

I'd spent a good few weeks perusing the site, reading all the stories it had on offer and loving them all. Most were written by the sites owner, Jason Donner, who seemed to be able to churn out scripts style parody fanfiction on an almost daily basis. At this point when I found the site he was working on a massive Star Trek Voyager and Sliders crossover by the name of "Space: Behind and Between" the title being a parody of the military Sci Fi show "Space: Above and Beyond" which sadly only lasted one season. 

Jason had not finished the crossover and I've no idea if he had any kind of fixed plan in mind originally or not, but he was adding a new part to the serial on an almost daily basis, each outlandishly funny in their own right, to the point that I wasn't just creased up with laughter, but having to run to the toilet due to losing control of my bladder.
And I have a very strong bladder, I've been known to hold it in for a couple of hours and when watching the Lord of the Rings movies when they first came out in the cinema manged to sit through them all with just a bit of squirming.
I wasn't so lucky here, but I was amused, and inspired all the same, and I always managed to make it to the toilet.

I put fingers to keyboard, and wrote, and wrote and wrote and wrote. And I discovered a writing weakness I had straight away. When do you end a story? How do you end a story?

Without going into too much details there are two main schools of thought regarding writing fiction, be it a short story, a novel or a script. One is to produce an outline of the story first and write the actual text of the story afterwards, possibly deviating or not. Another is to sit down and just write and write and write, letting the story flow from your mind through your fingers into the page or screen.
There's other variations as well but I wasn't aware of them back then.

I was definitely going with the later of these two models, and even in my future writings I would find the same problem would persist.

However I was not perturbed by this is the slightest, and wrote my own tale "Spoof Trek" which soon also became a sprawling multi part mega series crossover, this time with the TNG crew meeting up with the crew of the Red Dwarf. I also tied it into the "Space: Behind and Between" series, in the mistaken belief that all of the stories on this site were part of the "slightly warped" universe. Other contributors having also been inspired by the crossover mania would make their own sequels to it, also making their tales multipart serials as well, so I was far from alone in that regard.

On slightlywarped I would have Captain Kirk help the Rebels at Hoth, the crew of DS9 face off against a Xenomorph,  I even wrote a five part X-Files Transformers crossover, "More then meets the files" which oddly, Jason never published the last part, despite me submitting it twice. I did post all five parts on a transformers site called Tfextreme where the series was loved, along with some other specific Transformers parody fanfic, including my take on "The Return of Optimus Prime" but that site is now sadly defunct and those submissions sadly lost.

Eventually Slightlywarped.com grew so much the owner decided to get a proper domain name and hosting sorted out and the site moved from his local internet providers small amount of webspace and the additional space from Geocities (if you remember when they were a thing you might be feeling old now) and the site was reborn, without having actually died in the first place.

One of the things Jason decided to do in that regard was to create an original sit-com. "The Liam smith Show". Each script was formatted to look far more like a proper tv show script and again Jason was able to produce scripts for a full 20+ season show to fit a 30 minute slot on a proper TV show. The idea was that this would be a live action show and as such he had a cast list of actors to play the various parts of some decidedly oddball characters.

And again, he was willing to take guest scripts, of which, mine was the one of the first guest scripts to make it in that first season. The show had a tradition quickly established of bringing on board a "guest star" who would be killed off in a brutal fashion. Often the "guest" would be someone who had done something rather questionable in real life, sometimes quite recently. So I took this as my que to write a script that would see the cast meet the then recently disgraced British glam rock star, Gary Glitter.
Yeah, I think we can class that as a well deserved beating.

In season two I decided to create my own character for the show, a brooding parody of vampires of TV shows of the time, with an element of Blackadder thrown into the mix. Drew Fangtastic was born.

Or rather, found trapped in hell as the heroes had to make their own way into and out of hell on a mission of their own to restore hell to it's rightful ruler as an even more powerful evil had taken over. Drew acted like a guide and caught a lift out of hell and soon proved to have his own secret agenda involving hell itself.

The Liam Smith Show would also feature it's own ever growing group of recurring characters, which would include a roster of superheroes, some of whom would band together as the "Justice Squad" who would fight some of the more dangerous villains that cropped up the show.

Eventually, they would get their own spin off show once "Liam" was off the air, that was intended to be "animated", but by then they were already "cast" with well known actors of the time to draw further inspiration from.

Drew would of course continue to show up in the spinoff along with a number of other characters from the parent show who fit into the ongoing super heroic shenanigans.

Eventually Jason would close the website in January 2018. It lives on in the form of a facebook group where it continues to host the weird and wonderful things he finds online, but doesn't host the fanfiction and parodies the original website did. Do a search for "slightly warped" or "Liam Smith" or even "Justice Squad" and at best you might find some totally unrelated websites that are using the same terms, but alas, are nothing to do with the site I grew to love so much in the 90's onwards. Although if you put certain characters names into google you can find them on a website listing the names of various superhero's and what religion they are known to follow.

And someone called Rob name dropped a a few of the slightly warped heroes on a yahoo page about a decade ago. Rob, I salute you.

I had thought all the work that was on the site was now lost, I may have copies of the scripts on old hard drives but I've neither the time or inclination to go looking over them or trying to hook them up to take a look at their contents. Maybe some day I will. But I had believed them all to be lost.

But then I found out about the wayback machine and quickly found a good deal of the slightly warped materials backed up there. You just type in the URL, select the dates it has captured and bobs your uncle, you can see pretty much anything and everything on offer.
But not all sadly. Two of my "Justice Squad" scripts are not backed up there at all. Both "Sucks to be Drew" and the final of the saga of the life of the Vampire "Have I got news for you" cannot be found at all. Which is a strange case of history repeating itself, as my final scripts for "The Liam Smith Show" is also not archived,  no matter which dates you look at. And some graphics on the site haven't been saved either which means looking for images of Drew and the others is not an easy task.

Now, if I ever do break out the old hard drives I might be able to find those missing scripts and graphics, and even put them up here for prosperity, as well as any other material that might not have seen the light of day. One thing I do know after having used the wayback machine to recover what I can of my previous writings, a lot of it, while I'm happy with it in many ways, could do with a little rewrite work to spruce it back up. While others, could do with a total re-write as I honestly don't know what I was thinking when I submitted them in the form they are in.

I suppose that might very well be true of any writer looking back at their past work and retroactively applying what they know now, what they have learned since, to their post work.

But why bring up all of this in this blog post, unless I had some plan with it all? Well, yes, I do indeed have a plan. My intention is to recover all my past work for slightlywarped.com and archive it here, so if anyone can point me in the direction of another archive site like wayback machine that might have more of my stuff saved, I will be grateful.

Of course with some material missing and the ongoing story arch nature of "Liam" and "Justice Squad" there will be some missing ground to explain. I wasn't the only writer and some scripts do make reference to previous scripts of other people and some are part of massive series arch's where we all contributed at least one or two scripts to, and while I can justify to myself putting up my own work here, I can't justify putting up someone else's without their permission. 
But you can read most of everyone else's work via the wayback machine in any case.

I'm even intending to do full re-writes of my own scripts that I feel need it. If I do manage that, then you'd be able to read both the originals and their redux here.

But for now, this will be the start of a project I've been intending to do for quite awhile, ever since I found out about the wayback machine in fact.

So beware of future updates as this page will likely be updated once more and more material is edited and uploaded, so if there's something that looks like a link that isn't working, come back later and it might be uploaded by then. You may, or may not laugh at your leisure.

PARODY WORK

Star Trek

Spoof Trek: The confused generation: More crossovers between different Sci Fi shows
then you can shake a stick at. 

Spoof Trek II: The Search For An Ending: Even more crossovers between different 
Sci Fi shows (and some other genres) then you can shake an even bigger stick at.

Spoof Trek III : Final Conflict: The title might be a bit deceiving here.

Spoof Trek II: The Search For An Ending: Crossovers, something something, Sci Fi shows,
something something stick, something something dead horse

Star Wars

Star Trek Vs Star Wars: What happens when Kirk and Co find themselves mixed up with the evacuation of the ice planet Hoth?

X-Files

ORIGNAL WORKS

The Liam Smith Show

Justice Squad