Getting to Know You - Fandom Edition of 'About Me'

[kylaraingress]

An Intro to Me

Name: Kylara Ingress is my AO3 pseudonym, but am fine with being 'publicly known' as Angie Fiedler Sutton.

Age: just turned 50 in May

Location: Los Angeles now, but was born and raised in the Midwest

About me - fandom version: I have been online since the days of yore when you paid by the minute, you needed an installation CD to access it, and the internet screamed back. As it says on my website, I'm a writer, photographer, performing arts lover, podcaster, and proud fangirl geek.

I joined my first fan club some time in the mid to late 80s before I turned 16: a Doctor Who club in St. Louis called the Celestial Intervention Agency. At the time, I lived in a small town about 70 miles out, and my mom was nice enough to drive me back and forth to a couple of meetings.

I moved to Kansas City in '94 to go to college: Journalism major and theatre minor. I spent 20 years there, and many of it was working with an all-volunteer magazine called KC Stage that covered the performing arts in the city.

I also joined a sci fi/fantasy fan club when I moved to Kansas City, but it was filled with gatekeeping douche canoes and I didn't stick around.

I also apparently wrote fanfic in high school without knowing what it was, because I wrote a short story for a class that 'explained' how the Lone Isles became a part of Narnia.

But it wasn't until April 2000 when I found the article "Luke Skywalker is Gay?" on Slate where I found out about slashfic and fanfic.

My first 'pairing' was Joxer/Ares from Xena: Warrior Princess (which I read more for the WTF aspect of it than anything, and found it oddly appealing). But it was a chance comment about Quantum Leap that made me sit up and go, "Yeah, I can see that!" One of the things I had LOVED about the series was the chemistry between Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell.

I fell headlong into reading (and eventually writing) QL slashfic, and became a touch 'obsessed' with Dean (like 'I've seen 90% of thie items listed on his IMDB' type of obsessed). This was back in ye olde days of GeoCities websites, YahooGroups (first known as eGroups), and webrings. Through one of those YahooGroups, I discovered Sports Night (the first fandom I ever fell for the fic before seeing the show), and then when The Lone Gunmen series happened in 2001, I added another pairing. I wrote under the pseudonym Kylara Ingress: 'Kylara' I think I stole from Anne McCaffrey, and 'Ingress' because it means 'entrance'.

Due to a fandom kerfuffle I don't want to go in, I dropped out a couple of years later and took a LONG break from fandom.

I got re-hooked on fandom when I fell for Sherlock in October 2010, and thanks to TV Tropes discovered the fanfic (and AO3) relatively quickly. When I started writing, I debated whether I should write under my real name, as it no longer has/had the stigma it did back in 2000 when it was almost required to have a pseudonym - but decided for consistency sake I'd continue writing fanfic under Kylara Ingress.

I came to Los Angeles in 2013 to get my Masters in Specialized Journalism: The Arts, and that's when I 'discovered' I could also write about geeky things with my journalism degree. One of my thesis advisors was Henry Jenkins, who introduced me to the idea of acafandom.

My current obsessions are Sherlock (but only the fanfic), Doctor Who, and Quantum Leap. I have other shows I consider myself a fan of but don't feel like I'm 'in the fandom', so to speak. (Good Omens and Dead Boy Detectives the primary two.) I also have fallen madly in love with my super-secret boyfriend Martin Freeman and my fandom husband Michael Sheen, and they both are closing in on Dean Stockwell on the 'seeing everything on their IMDB list' quotient.

I also am a huge theatre nerd, and love musicals.

About My Journal: Oh, dear. I was an early adopter of MySpace and Blogspot, and also was on LiveJournal during its heyday. I was always looking for a place to put my various writings.

(In fact, back in 2000, I ended up creating the website "It Takes All Kinds" to host all my fanfic in one place, because back then there wasn't one place to do that.) It technically has a page on Fanlore and you can technically still access it via the WayBack Machine.

While my LiveJournal was more personal and an attempt to have someplace to put reviews and rambles, by the time it went kaboom and I moved over to Dreamwidth, I already had my own website for my writing and so decided the Dreamwidth would be my 'fannish' side. I update it when I remember, and have been getting better.

What I Write: for nonfiction, I write reviews of and interviews from theatre and geek media (and currently freelance primarily for The Geekiary). (I also produce my own podcast, Contents May Vary, where I interview geeky people about geeky things - although it's been a few months since the last update.) I try to focus on creators that are NOT cis straight white men.

Fiction: I tend to stick to fanfic, but the few non-fanfic stories I've written have been fantasy and one 'coming of age' story.

What I Don't Write: as much as I love them, I canNOT get my head around writing mysteries (which is why I haven't done a casefic for Sherlock) or horror.

What I Read: other than fanfic, my reading has dwindled a LOT in the last five years. But I read a little bit of everything, but like fantasy and science fiction. The books on my 'currently reading' shelf are Camelot & Vine, by Petrea Burchard and The Sound Book, by Trevor Cox.

What I Don't Read: I don't like political thrillers, or a lot of 'classic' lit. I also tend to stay away from historical.