Once, long ago, I was very much into Starsky and Hutch fandom. My interest these days is peripheral, but I have fond spot for it in my heart, and always will. This fandom was the one that showed me what friendship was all about; nobody could love each other the way the boys do. For some reason, while in the fandom, I produced no songvids, and only five stories, only three of which ever got published. (The other two, I recently submitted to two fanzines, and they should be out in a year.) I guess I was more involved in reading the fanfic and collecting songvids than creating anything.

This post, in particular, is about the fanfiction Velveteen Hutch. You can read it on Flamingo’s Website, which is an amazing collection of all that is Starsky and Hutch. When I wrote the story I was living with Regina, who kindly took me in after my life fell apart when I was living in downtown Denver. That’s a story for another time, but while I was there, with her, I bought my first PC, and began composing my own stories for this fandom. I wrote two at slash stories the same time: Velveteen Hutch and Sky Blue and Black.

Velveteen Hutch went to Linda Cabrillo’s fanzine called Turned to Fire. I also sent her Sky Blue and Black, but she rejected it. I remember her saying, with much kindness, that the fandom didn’t much call for the kind of aggression and violence that the story contained. She did say that Velveteen Hutch was perfect (suggesting a change in the title from “The Velveteen Hutch,” to just “Velveteen Hutch”), but I was somewhat put out. Writing Velveteen Hutch had been easy for me, with its first person viewpoint (Hutch’s) and the breezy, easy stream of consciousness that came to me as I typed. So, thusly, since it was easy, it could not possibly be worth anything. On the other hand, writing Sky Blue and Black had been hard. The story had a plot, a bad guy, two points of view, and was long. Not sure how many words, but at least three times as long as the other story. Thus, it should be worth more. But it wasn’t.

I eventually found a home for it in Caro Hedge’s Red Hot Lovers, but the zine had limited release, and very few readers. To this day, I’ve gotten very little back about it, but I still think it’s a good story.  That story is included in another post in my blog.

The comments I have gotten back on Velveteen Hutch have astounded and pleased me. I was moved by the way people were affected by the story. And amazed that it’s still remembered out there in internet-land over ten years later.