Somewhere Over The Rainbow

I have no idea what I was doing on July 12, 1997, but I didn’t have HBO at the time.

I didn’t start watching Oz until a few years later. I either rented it on Netflix or at one of the local video stores. I was binge-watching before binge-watching was really cool. I remember watching a season or two and then going back to St Louis (where we had cable) and catching one of the “live” episodes then, and thinking to myself on seeing Ryan O’Reily – “That asshole is still alive?” That was one of the great things about Oz, people surviving that you wouldn’t expect and other people getting killed that you wouldn’t expect.

I read all the recaps and then started to watch the forum threads on the now-defunct Television Without Pity site. The forum there eventually led me to oz_magi which was the first time I’d ever encountered fanfic. I devoured all of the stories on the site, even found a couple featuring McManus/Murphy, which I categorized as “weird, but believable. I started to think of ideas for next year’s Oz Magi. I really wanted somebody to write a story slashing Jia Kenmin with Ryan O’Reily. (It’s still in my head. I know how it should go down. Maybe I should just write it.) But I knew the only way to get involved in Magi was to sign up for LJ which I did on July 22, 2006.

I quickly discovered the OZ community and decided to start small in unleashing my Jia Kenmin love to the world (even not being involved in fandom, I knew I would have to get an audience somewhere) and wrote my first drabble for the hardtime100 community challenge 103 To Be or Not to Be. Due to the lack of response, I moved on to less obscure characters. I then continued to stalk the community for the next few years, eagerly jumping on the opportunity to write on the next prompt as soon as it was posted.

One thing that I love about the show and writing for this particular fandom is how much of an ensemble show that it was. Sure, Beecher and Keller took as much of my attention as anyone’s, but it was nice to be able to leave them in the capable hands of many other writers and be able to play in the rest of the sandbox.

In the past 11 years with this fandom, I’ve written at least 75 fics, 3 of which were multi-part pieces (only one still incomplete) and over 150 drabbles. Some were well-received, some died a quiet death. Quite a few of them featured McManus/Murphy (my OTP), but they ran the spectrum from the conventional (B/K) to the random (Vern Schillinger being de-aged) to the just plain wrong (Claire Howell/Harrison Beecher).

It’s nice seeing this fandom still chugging along after all of these years and being able to talk with new fans along the way. It’s the people that I’ve met here that keep me coming back, that keep challenging me and keep my love for this little show going strong.

Thank you.