Discovering Buffy
In September 2000, I accepted a job transfer that took my youngest daughter three hours away from her friends and her school.
This did *not * go over well.
In fact, it was a nightmare for her. And never one to be alone in her feelings, she proceeded to make it a nightmare that included me.
Every conversation ended with a shouting match about how I'd ruined her life by taking her from her friends. Every curt nod and curled lip ended in confrontation. My daughter was sixteen and a walking time bomb. Things got so bad that the only time that we were in the same room was when she came into mine to watch Roswell on our small television. The large one had been too big to move in the small truck we'd had to rent.
At that time, Roswell came on at 8 central on the WB here in Nashville. It was a fight to get a decent picture on the UHF station, since we'd moved there on a shoestring budget as soon as the position came open. Rabbit's ears were worse than useless. I'd spend as much as thirty minutes moving the cable cord around the room, finally learning that I could tape it to the wall to get the kind of reception that we could live with.
After a couple of weeks, I began to look ridiculously forward to our Tuesday night's viewing. So forward to it that as soon as I came home from work, I began fooling with the reception, ordering pizza, and making the night as much as a pleasure for her, and myself, as I possibly could. As early as six p.m., I'd be sitting on the bed, all settled in, ready for our little piece of time as she sat fuming in her bedroom.
That's how I discovered Buffy.
I knew the show existed, of course. How could I not? I had three daughters who were 18, 16 and 13 when the show started on the air. We were back in my hometown, after 18 years in Louisiana, living in a lovely old farm house eight miles outside the city limits. With satellite service.
I remember walking through now and then, sometimes actually sitting down to watch when 'Sid and Nancy' were onscreen during the second season of BtVS. One daughter wouldn't miss the show. But it was nothing I was invested in. I was renovating the farmhouse, refinishing furniture, restarting an old relationship from high school. I was *so* not in TV mode!
Oddly, it took five years for me to get hooked. But it wasn't the first of the season that hooked me. I was watching, but not in a fevered way. Just waiting for my daughter to join me for a little while without any arguments brewing.
As it always happens sooner or later, she began to make new friends. And sometimes, she wasn't around at eight p.m. on Tuesday night. For a while, I watched alone, still in that Tuesday night habit. Sometimes I napped. But I always taped Roswell for her, even when I didn't turn on the television. That's how I missed "Crush," "I Was Made to Love You," and "The Body."
But I saw "Intervention." Suddenly those months of casual viewing turned into something close to obsession. I gritted my teeth when I realized that I'd managed to begin tuning into this clever, thought-provoking show just in time for the end of the series.
From there, it was all downhill. I watched the series finale, finding out just before I saw it that Buffy was moving to UPN in the fall. I drove myself crazy all summer, looking for entertainment articles in the press. At that time, I didn't know about on-line fandom. I was a frustrated woman.
Just before the new season started, I began voraciously watching Buffy on FX, from Season 1 to Season 5 (what episodes FX was able to get from 5 in that first run). I religiously taped them, often watching at the same time, building my knowledge of the characters and the Buffyverse from these 'stripped' episodes.
You could get an entire season of episodes watched and digested in 11 days. Two weeks and a day. And start the next season the next night at 5 pm. One character particularly fascinated me when watching those repeats every day.
You guessed it. I was completely caught up in the multi-faceted creature that was Spike. I have to blame the writers and the level of acting for that, because in Season 4, he was nothing more than an oddball, looking into the Scooby Gang from the outside. That appealed to me for some insane reason.
When Season 6 started, I was elated, blown-away, out of my head over what they were doing. The musical, which I'd scoffed at, was broadcast. I nearly fainted at the genius of a musical episode that could so brilliantly move the story along, accelerating the pace to such a degree that I was in awe.
Then, the worst thing to date happened. Worse even that the idea that I'd been missing something that good for all those years from 1997 to 2000.
I encountered my first hiatus. Right after "Wrecked." That's right. My very first rerun hell.
Wild with the need for more Buffy, I dove into the internet, finding the UPN website, hoping for some announcement of when the next ep would air. And I found the Bronze.
All the shout outs and clever in-jokes meant nothing to me. It was amusing but it wasn't giving me what I needed. Also, the computerese spelling nearly drove me mad.
So I ran my very first Internet search on Yahoo.
Holy Mother of God!
I discovered fandom. I discovered lists. I clicked on a link and found my first discussion board. All these people who had to be either geniuses or my age, because there were thought-provoking missives on every aspect of the show.
And I discovered fanfiction.
Only eighteen months ago, I didn't know what on-line fandom was. As of today, I've written (I'm actually adding this up as I go) 24 stories of varying lengths, from ficlets to two finished novella-length stories, with two more novellas in progress even as we speak. Over 220,000 words. I've met over 15 fellow writers from my two fiction lists, Spike's Salvation and the Bloody Awful Gutter, at two conventions, one in Baltimore last year and this year in Chicago. I'll be meeting up with them again and some others who were unable to make the first two when we all migrate to Tampa for a convention there in July.
The kindness I've encountered, the sense of community, is unparalleled. After a fire destroyed much of our apartment in Nashville in March 2001, including my computer, a new one was delivered to me less than three weeks later, complete with bells, whistles and Spike .wav files. It was a product of the efforts of all three of the lists I was on at the time; a fund raising coup that still takes my breath every time I think about it. And I didn't know a thing about it until one of the list members showed up at my house with the computer riding happily in the trunk of her car.
I still say it was because they wanted to know how my first fic in progress was going to turn out.
When we were meeting to discuss the upcoming Slayage conference here in Nashville next May, I told Dr. Lavery this story. Coming into fandom such a short time ago, it seemed surprising, I guess, that I would be in so far that I would actually make a 'cold call' on a local English professor to offer my help. And actually have some 'help' to give. I can hardly wait!
Stranger things have happened, though. After all, who would have linked up a rebellious child, the fact that "Buffy" preceded "Roswell" on Tuesday nights, and my Obsesso Girl nature with an academic conference?
Of course, at the moment, the burning question in my mind is this: What do I do on Tuesday night from now on?
And I suppose the answer would be this:
Write fanfic. After all, Joss told us to.
Hell, it's not like I'm not already doing it anyway.
And my daughter? She's fine and wouldn't leave Nashville now if her life depended on it. Eighteen and a half now, and as sick of BtVS as any one could ever be. Of course, she's not home much anymore, so that's not really a problem, is it?
Kim E. Taylor
Kimi