Subreality Cafe: Ancient History

by Bayeux and Tapestry

"It's done! Ha ha! Number twenty is finally done!"

"What about the rewrite Karl is going to make you do?" his companion smiled. Harry shoved his rolling chair away from the desk and shrugged cheerfully.

"Until he sends me the edited version of the final draft I couldn't care less," he informed her, rising to his feet and stuffing the manuscript into a nearby box. "I'll drop it in the mail tomorrow and worry about it then. Tonight I am _done._"

Harry's muse laughed. "As long as you're happy," she said, eyes sparkling. Harry grinned maniacally and grabbed her by the waist, lifting her up and spinning her around the room.

"I think the long hours finally got to you," she remarked, laughing despite herself. "Put me down. You're going to hurt yourself."

"Whatever you say, milady." Harry dropped her. Since she was actually an inch taller than her writer she didn't fall far.

"You should finish books more often if they make you feel this good," the muse told him, brushing down her jeans. "You'd save a lot of money on antidepressants."

"Hey, I've been working on it for five months, of course I'm happy," Harry replied, nonplused. The joke was to be expected after such a long partnership. The muse had been with him for so long she'd gradually grown to resemble his first successful heroine, Elyse, although she had never responded well to any attempt at naming. Harry simply thought of her as "the muse."

Well, even writers have their creative blind spots.

"Twenty books before I hit forty," Harry repeated, looking at the box he'd set on the table. "I wish mom could see me now. She never thought I'd get away writing for a living. Not fiction, anyway."

"You didn't for your first seven," the muse reminded him, smiling her crooked smile. "Bugging you while you were stocking shelves eight hours a day was oddly rewarding."

"You weren't bugging me. I think talking to you was the only reason I didn't do a strafing run of the produce section."

"Save your flattery. You would never have made it past the background check anyway."

There was a time when Harry would have wondered whether or not he was hallucinating, schizophrenic, or possibly just unconscious on his keyboard and marring his document with a long line of "hhhhhhhhhh"s again. After his nervous breakdown in college reality had been a little blurry, and since he'd begun writing fantasy the line had dissolved almost completely. By the time he got around to wondering how he could pick up and spin a figment of his imagination his sanity went for a beer-run.

Speaking of which . . .

"Time to hit the bar," Harry said, looking around the room for his wallet. He found it next to his work area, buried under a stack of papers that had been there so long they were beginning to develop their own ecosystems. Odd that out of all the space in the townhouse, he had to save the mess for the six square feet that surrounded his desk.

He picked up the wallet and checked it; it held a rumpled, lonely-looking fifty. More than enough for a light drinker like himself.

"Have fun," the muse smiled as she picked up the dirty dishes that had been balancing on the shelf. Eight years ago Harry had established the tradition of getting himself, if not roaring drunk, than at least pleasantly intoxicated the night he finished a novel, which would have come to no surprise for any who read his work. The muse encouraged this, citing that it was good to emerge from his cave every few months and, on one or two occasions, possibly wake up in someone else's the following morning. On some level Harry was somewhat disturbed that his muse was coaching him on his love-life. On the other, more logical level, Harry decided that it was nature's way of telling him he could use all the help he could get.

"I'll be back later," Harry commented, mostly to himself. The muse knew his routine well; she wouldn't bother him tonight. Tomorrow he would start plotting his next book, but tonight his calendar was free.

"Remember the designated driver this time, okay?" the muse warned, half-turning from the doorway. "Your car isn't going to survive another encounter with that telephone pole."

"So I won't take the car. Where's my coat?"

"You mean the thing you shoved under the kitchen table to keep it from wobbling?"

"Was that what it was? Damn, that means I haven't been out in a month . . ."

"All the more reason why you should go. Now scat." The muse pulled the coat out from under the tableleg and threw it at Harry's face. She brushed the blond hair out of her eyes and smirked at her cursing writer.

"Play nice with the locals," she said as the novelist pulled on his jacket, giving her a dark look as he brushed bits of fossilized food from the lapels. "Tomorrow -- we work."

"My joy transcends words," Harry snorted. The muse grinned smugly and disappeared into the kitchen -- then from reality altogether. She'd gone to her own bar.

"At least someone can go home again," Harry muttered, and stepped out the door. He inhaled deeply, breathing in the sharp, cold night air. There was a hint of snow in the air.

Harry smiled faintly and slid his hands into his coat pockets. The bar was only a few blocks away, and walking helped him think. Now was as good a time as anyway.

Step, step, step. /He's in college with assignments up to his neck, and tuition is due in two days. There's no way he can make it, and his parents aren't going to pay it for him./

Step, step, step. /He's laying on his bed, the blood from his wrists soaking into the sheets. He wonders what he's doing wrong./

Step, step, step. /"I know I was stupid. You know I was stupid. Can we just drop the subject and move on?"/

Step, step, step. /"What's this stuff at the URL you gave me?" "That's fanfiction." "What's that?" "Isn't that sort of obvious, moron?"/

Harry scuffed his feet against the salty sidewalk. Connect your feet to your brain and you're just asking to stroll down memory lane. January had always been a hard month for him, January nights even more so, and now that the book was finished his mind was free to wander all it liked. A drink was definitely what he needed.

Harry stared at the abstract patterns created where the salt had leeched into the pavement. He pulled his eyes up and looked at the sky instead. The lights of the city blocked out most of the stars, but he could still see one or two shining against the black expanse. High overhead the moon was waxing gibbous.

Not many other people were out tonight. It wasn't particularly cold, but it was late, and the city didn't have a particularly active nightlife. It reminded him of another place he'd known, long ago . . .

Oh, he hadn't gone there often, of course. He'd never felt right about it. Still, what fanfic writer hadn't heard about the Subreality Cafe?

Harry smiled at the other, more pleasant memories that flooded back to him. Once he'd posted things online under the name Alex Barset -- a nick that hadn't seemed like a nick and had thus caused a lot of confusion at some of the conventions he'd attended. He'd dabbled in a few different kinds of fic -- mostly Marvel, although he'd done a few with Gen13 and DV8 once, on a dare -- but nothing major. His friend Andrew had gotten him involved in the genre after their mutual stint at the hospital for, of all things, attempted suicide.

It wasn't something Harry liked to recall, even so many years later, but he had to admit it had influenced his work. He'd even found homes for those few people he'd met and liked: the kind, anorexic girl who had helped him adjust those first few hard days; the gentle, precocious bulemic who'd made him laugh during enforced therapy; even Andrew, whose wrists had appeared to have been run through a haythresher and then fastened back onto his arms. It wasn't an experience one could forget.

But some good had come from it. During those long, boring afternoons he'd happened to run across Andrew, the consummate comics geek, while he was surfing the web on one of the hospital computers. He'd seen Marty Blase's X-Page. He'd been fascinated. Andrew, all too happy to find a mark (and, Harry privately suspected, perhaps seeing some way of pulling Harry out of his slump) had pushed Harry into the fandom headfirst, starting with alt.comics.fan-fiction.

Harry, at the time only a casual reader and (more importantly) starved for stimulus, pursued the subject with interest, starting with "Kid Dynamo." After some consideration, he'd printed it. He'd had to carry it out in a suitcase.

Once released Harry had, with some trepidation, abused the school's Internet access program and started searching the web. Almost immediately he had found Hawk's Fanfiction Archive, and from there on he'd been lost.

A smile tugged at Harry's lips as he remembered the six years he'd spent in the fandom, tentatively posting to a number of subgenres, watching history roll by. Well, he called it "history" -- and it did seem to be, to him -- although he knew very well it had little impact on any world but that one.

He remembered with some fondness reading the first Common People story and smiling. This, he remembered thinking, was something he could do well. He'd typed out a few ideas, even submitted one or two, but had later decided they were better used for other purposes. (He'd been right. After a little judicious editing and polishing three of those would-be-TCPs had been published in two magazines and an anthology, respectively.)

Still, that had been a few years later. What Harry had liked most was Subreality.

Sometime in the summer of 1997 the Subreality Cafe had appeared. Harry hadn't quite cottoned to it at first, but eventually he became intrigued by the oddness of the place. The mixture of fiction, reality, and canon information was fascinating.

With interest he watched subgenres develop around the idea, like ballistic sprouts around an already convoluted tree. He even followed some of the old round robins on the Generation X Fanfiction archive, and marveled at then-epic pieces such as "A Cold Dash of (Sub)Reality" and "It's Not the Fall That Kills You . . . It's the Beer and Bunnyslippers." He fancied himself something of a historian, keeping all available stories on hard drive and making his own little private FAQ as a kind of hobby. He'd even thought about offering to take up the archiving when the first SC archive had gone down -- a possibility which he had considered until he realized he not only couldn't HTML worth a damn, he had no time to maintain an archive. And anyway, Kielle had taken control of it not long afterwards.

Its subgenres were numerous. Harry tried to think of them all as he kicked a loose stone across the pavement, chewing his lip. _Let's see . . . there was the original, then Writer's Cafe and the RRs, and Shantytown, and the Muses . . ._

Theoretically, the muses of Subreality had been the basis for his muse. At least, he hoped so. He hated to think his mind had pulled her out of nowhere.

The influence on him had been subtle. He'd first seen mention of them while reading the Tapslaught round robin on the CFAN SCRR messageboard, then he'd seen a few fics . . . and the next thing he knew he was walking into his dorm room to discover a leggy blonde sprawled across his bed, wearing a dress that could have doubled as a scarf and drawling "It's about time you got home" . . .

The resulting conversation had been embarrassing. It had involved words like "what," "how," and, at one point, "please."

Earlier that day Harry had tripped and hit his head very hard on the railing that bordered the walkway he took to work, suffering a minor concussion. He'd had no idea how immensely relieved that would make him feel later that day.

Aside from the muse, Harry's involvement in Subreality had been very loose. Truthfully, he'd felt to intimidated to get involved. He saw many popular writers making contributions, and he didn't know more than a few of them, and then he became afraid that he wasn't good enough to pull it off, and then . . .

Well, suffice to say the "and then"s had piled up.

But there were other reasons. Even though he'd been in the fandom for a long time, and had feedbacked and even carried on a conversation with a few of the bigger names in fanfic, he had never formed a bond with any in particular. Oh, sure, he'd gone to a few ficmeets and was a regular on IRC, but he never felt as if he'd connected in the way he saw others connecting. While others adopted siblings and aunts and uncles Harry always hung to one side, unsure of how to connect. He was generally well-liked, being mild and fairly well-behaved, but he'd never formed a close relationship with any of his fellow writers.  Not aside from the online romance with the charming girl from Salt Lake . . . but that had ended badly when things had gotten too "real." He didn't like to think about that, either.

On some level he was glad he'd never gotten too close. After seeing some of the arguments that occasionally flowed into the Duke Out message board in the late nineties he was grateful no one had ever gotten close enough to learn to hate him.

And that was the downside of the community, wasn't it? People learned to love each other, but they couldn't learn love without learning hate, too. There was fighting, and pettiness, and backbiting, and grudges. Sometimes people made up and became friends, other times they didn't. Either way, it was frightening to watch. Harry could only imagine how some of the newbies had felt coming in on an argument about channel ops in IRC or the etiquette of round robins. Sometimes _he_ felt like leaving. It all seemed so unnecessary . . . and unprofessional.

They weren't his fights, so he had stayed out of it. They had blown over in time, of course, but sometimes the hard feelings remained. And sometimes that made people look for messages that weren't really there, just so they could start the arguments all over again.

Harry almost laughed at himself right there in the middle of the street. But that was what people did, wasn't it? Once they got to know one another, that is. It was easy to be polite to strangers -- it was being polite to _friends_ that was tricky.

Why couldn't people just get along? Was there something inherent to human nature that made complete peace impossible, even in Subreality? He wished he knew.

Still, Harry didn't think it was the occasional infighting that had made him leave the fandom. He'd just gotten tired of it, little by little, until he'd dropped out of writing, then dropped off chat, then finally dropped out of the community completely. He was still in touch with one or two people he'd met there and used as betareaders -- one of whom even ran a website for his novels -- and every so often he'd get feedback from one of his old fanfics. Even the Alex Barset persona was still in use; Harry would occasionally post under the name when he wanted to get an unbiased opinion of his work and bounce ideas off readers. Otherwise he had effectively removed himself from the Internet.

It had its drawbacks. For one, "real" fans seemed a lot more inclined to mental illness than those in fanfic. This had surprised him greatly considering the impressive list of neurosis possessed by some of the ficcers he'd met. The surprise had lasted about as long as it had taken him to figure out that _all_ people were, in some way, shape or form, mildly deranged.

He missed it sometimes, of course. It had been a good six years, from 1995 to 2001, and it had certainly helped him improve his writing. And he really did wonder what the fandom was like now . . .

Well, why not? He had an Internet connection, after all, and he was sure CFAN was searchable. The site was so popular it had been mention in a book on comics ten or eleven years before -- surely it was still there, even on the off chance it was under new management.

Harry paused. He was standing in front of the bar now, but suddenly that didn't seem so important. It _was_ his night off, and he didn't _have_ to spend it drinking.

He half-smiled. He never had told anyone about the muse. He wondered if Subreality had changed too much to let him introduce her. She was probably there now, most likely at a cafe with some other muses, drinking the night away. She seemed to like that.

Harry turned on his heel and started back home, towards his computer and its Internet connection. And its word processor, come to that.

He wasn't worried about trying to write without his muse. Her purpose seemed to be more that of a sounding board than anything else, and their relationship somewhat . . . complicated. He wished he could figure out whether or not she was a figment of his imagination. Then he would know whether his feelings for her were something serious or just the epitome of narcissism.

But that was a story for another day, thank goodness.

Harry walked home, his feelings oscillating from fear to anticipation and back again. He wasn't sure if this was something you were "allowed" to do when you were published -- if you were able to go home again after ten years of absence. A decade was an eternity on the Internet -- he doubted anyone he knew would be left.

But he would go anyway, and write the SC he had always wanted to write . . . and just maybe he would get a message in his inbox saying "That was a neat story. Hey, aren't you the guy who wrote . . ?"

It would be different, of course. Almost like being a newbie again. Still, he'd survived it once, he could survive it again. Even if it was only for a little while.

He smiled briefly. He was going to have to keep his ego in check now. Just because he made his living by writing didn't mean he could expect to be popular. Probably quite the opposite. He'd behave.

After he talked to the muse, anyway. Maybe that would be his story: finding his muse. He could see it now. He'd enter the bar, their eyes would meet across the crowded floor . . . he'd inevitably trip over someone, spill their drink and start a barfight . . .

All right, maybe not.

Maybe he'd do a little more fanfic. Just for fun. Maybe he'd even write a story for his muse, just to tell her how he felt. Someday.

He smiled. But, and here was the brilliance of it -- he didn't have to. He'd always have the option. He'd forgotten one of Subreality's biggest assets: there was always the option. Always.

And he'd be damned if he didn't make the most of it.

Harry smiled into the cloudy night sky. It was time to go home.

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