User blog:Gideoncrawle/Why am I here?

I have recently been asked what led me to the wiki. Since others may want to know as well, the simplest way to answer is on a blog post.

As I mentioned on my User page, I am much older than TDI’s target demographic. TDI watchers in my family range from my nephew (then 7 years old) to my mother (then 73 years old). All of us except my mother also watched TDA. (She didn’t because she’d had all she could take of Chris, and because she had see one fart joke too many.)

I have been on the main TD wiki for almost a year, albeit under a different username and with only a handful of edits, but I only became aware of the fanfic wiki a couple of months ago.

At that time, I had been working on Total Drama Island, by Gilbert and Sullivan (“TDI-G&S”, commonly pronounced “Tiddigus”) for about a year. This massive project, briefly described on my User page, was (and, in fact, still is) intended for a general-interest website run by a friend of mine. The thought occurred that I could put a version on the wiki, as well, and thereby increase its exposure. (It’s not a true fanfic in that it doesn’t have an original plot, but it’s plenty inventive in other ways.) My original plan was to not become a registered user until I was ready to start porting TDI-G&S.

At the time, the notion of writing original stories wasn’t even on my radar. I was going to become a registered user for one purpose, and one purpose alone: to promote TDI-G&S, which has consumed most of my spare time since about the time TDDDDI premiered. That changed abruptly a few weeks ago.

I was making a revision to the “Hook, Line and Screamer” section. For the scene where the Escaped Psycho Killer With a Chainsaw and a Hook fires up his chainsaw to menace Gwen, only to have the rest of the gang burst into the lodge to warn her of her peril, I decided to set this previously passed-over verse from The Pirates of Penzance:


 * Is he to die, unshriven—unannealed?


 * Will no one in his cause a weapon wield?


 * Yes, we are here, though hitherto concealed!


 * So to Constabulary, pirates, yield!

Suddenly, from out of the blue, I had an idea—an idea that would become the premise for my short story, Legacy.

I had intended to not develop that story idea until I had finished TDI-G&S, but that was not to be. The story fleshed itself out in my mind, pretty much of its own accord, and became so distracting that I had to put the larger project aside, at least on my bus commutes. Although revisions would take considerably longer, I wrote roughly 60% of “Legacy” in just 3 days of commutes. Such is the nature of inspiration.

Because my initial burst of creativity did not include any notion of how the story should end (indeed, the ending still seems a bit weak to me, although I’m proud of “Legacy” otherwise), I didn’t become a registered user and start posting the story until it was finished. I could have posted the entire story at once, but I read somewhere that posting multi-chapter stories piecemeal tends to generate more feedback.

So, that is how you find me now, on the wiki a couple of months ahead of schedule.