I listened to Chapter 9 “Flotsam and Jetsam” of Book Three of The Lord of the Rings (the unabridged audiobook of The Two Towers read by Rob Inglis) and I realized I made a grave mistake in my fanfiction story. I hadn’t been listening very long on my drive to work this morning when I heard the following conversation:
‘And here also is your brooch, Pippin,’ said Aragorn. ‘I have kept it safe, for it is a very precious thing.’ ‘I know,’ said Pippin. ‘It was a wrench to let it go; but what else could I do?’ ‘Nothing else,’ answered Aragorn. ‘One who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters. You did rightly.’
Tolkien, J.R.R, The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 9 “Flotsam and Jetsam”
I immediately realized I had completely forgotten the return of the brooch to Pippin by Aragorn when they were reunited at the gates of Isengard. If I do decide to write a final draft of my Pippin short story, I will have to adjust it a bit to match the above.
Yesterday, I bravely supplied my first rough draft of my first ever fanfiction in a post about an interactive session I attended at MiddlMoot 2019. Today, I’m posting my second draft, and the one I submitted to be read and voted upon by the attendees of MiddleMoot.
First paragraph of second draft in my ‘better’ handwriting?
Nicole Evans preparing for her MiddleMoot 2019 session on FanFiction
On Saturday, October 12th, I attended my second MiddleMoot, hosted on the campus of Hawkeye Community College in Waterloo, Iowa. After the Welcome Address delivered by Robert Steed in the auditorium of Tama Hall, the first session I attended was a fascinating look at the theme of female grief as foresight and subcreation by Jude Bleile (more details forthcoming in a separate post). The following session I selected from the program was entitled “The Journey of FanFiction” presented by Nicole Evans, a fellow member of the Tolkien Society of Kansas City, a librarian, writer and blogger.
Fellow TSoKC members Ross and Robbie visit with Corey Olsen prior to Nicole’s presentation
Nicole spoke briefly about the history of fanfiction, even citing examples from her adolescence (over 12,000 on one site alone but who’s counting?) and explained the interactive nature of her session. We, the audience, would select five pieces of a story puzzle that we then would assemble creatively into a short fanfiction story. We could then enter our story into a pool to be read and voted on by attendees for a prize to be awarded at the end of the conference.
The five elements we would drew were Character, Object, Setting, Plot and First Lines. The photo below displays my drawing. We had approximately thirty minutes to compose our tales. We were to underline each item as we used it in our story so the readers/judges could confirm we had used all five.
Corey Olsen would write fanfiction using Odo as a character, the Arkenstone for an object, Mordor as a setting, sneaking into the Council of Elrond for a plot and start off with a first line of ‘I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.’
