In September 1998, things were going very well. My beloved Yankees were headed for an historic championship, I was finally selling a condominium that I'd been trying to unload for a couple of years, and I was getting ready to join the ranks of Ranma fanfic authors. While on a business trip, I spent my idle hours in a hotel in rural New Jersey (yes, there is a rural New Jersey) typing furiously away on my laptop. My first fic, a script-style romantic comedy called At Least Not Yet: Ranma 1/2 Movie 5, had evolved slowly over the summer. As ever, isolation proved an excellent creative boost and, over three nights, I wrote several kilobytes of damn good screenplay for my fanfictional feature film. I think that those of you who appreciate my sense of humor would have found the "movie" very funny.
At the same time, I had developed a partial outline and written several scenes for a second fic. Hitched was to be a plain prose continuation of McKinley Morganfield's unfinished I'm Waiting for the Day, to which I was adding some martial intrigue as well as a psychological treatment of Ryouga's self-misdirection. This was to be my shot at the elusive Ukyou-gets-Ranma story, as well as my first attempt at an alternate reality (diverting from the manga at Volume 20).
But a catastrophic hard drive failure put an end to all that. I lost everything I had done that week in New Jersey. And when I returned home, I found that I had accidentally deleted my most recent backup. All I had left was an early draft of Movie 5, and a few passages of mostly-discarded material for the prose fic.
Obviously, I was devastated. A heavy workload in the following weeks made it impossible to attempt an immediate recovery. When the tidal wave had passed, I made a few halting attempts to get re-started, but I lacked the heart, despising my work while I built up an impossibly perfect image of what had been lost.
Worse, I couldn't even read any Ranma fanfic without getting depressed about the loss. So apart from the ending of Ill Met by Starlight and a few other works from some of my favorite authors, I stopped reading Ranma fics entirely in the Fall of '98. I've peeked in on RAAC a few times since then to see what was going on, but never felt motivated to re-immerse myself in the milieu I had once so cherished.
I'm providing this explanation because a few correspondents have written to me postulating that my disappearance from the Ranma fan fiction scene was the result of some disenchantment with the state of the art. As you can see, however, I have no such negative feelings about the quality or content of recent Ranma fanfics. I have no general opinion of recent fics because I have read so few. In the words of your spineless ex-boyfriend, "It's not you, it's me."
Don't feel badly for me. The rest of my life has gone well with a big raise and promotion at work and a very satisfying family life that includes the birth two weeks ago of my second child. While my leisure time is less than it as once, I may yet return to reading Ranma fanfic and commenting on it. Maybe I'll even get back to trying to tell my own stories.
Whatever. Take care.
Taleswapper
September 10, 1999