No, that's not a picture of me. I only wish I was that cute. This is Morgan le Fey, the weekend after she came to live with me in October of 2001.

So, if I'm not an adorable kitten, who the heck am I? To do the dry facts:

Name: Anne Higgins, but not really

Place of residence: Indianapolis, IN

Birth: June 7, 1959

Occupation: Do a bit of everything for an insurance company's corporate communications department.

Education: Graduate of Indiana University. BA in psych with minors in political science and English

Family: I'm single, live in a condo with three cats: Shadow (my little black cat), Sidney (my only boy) and Morgan.

I wasn't going to do this bio thing. Heck, I'm not all that fond of introducing myself on lists, but someone asked me to, so here I am. What my well meaning fan really wanted to know was how Anne started writing, so let's see if I can figure it out.

I suppose the first thing to touch on is the "but not really" thing. My name isn't Anne Higgins. She's a pen name I adopted when I entered fandom. I did it on the advice of an on-line acquaintance who said she had found that publishers didn't take her seriously because they knew she'd written fan fic. As I did and still do have professional aspirations, I opted to be cautious and use a pen name.

The Higgins part comes from Jack Higgins, who was a favored author at the time. I learned how to write a fight scene from reading his books.

That said, my real name isn't a huge secret. I'll tell you what it is if I meet you at a con. Probably will even have it on my name badge. It's just that for the reason mentioned above, I don't want Web links to it. Okay, so on with the story of how Anne came to be.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't writing. Oh, there were plenty of years I didn't, but my memory isn't what it used to be. :> Seriously, it's hard to separate the years out, but two things stick in my mind.

The hot rock group at the time was The Monkees and I remember using Farmer Mickey in a school assignment to write about a picture of a farm. Mickey always was my fav. :> That would have been somewhere between third and fifth grade.

In sixth grade I wrote my first full fan fic story. It was a Partridge Family tale in which Keith contracted a painful, incurable disease. Ever the happy ending freak, I let him recover to tears of joy. No, I don't still have the story. Wish I did. Be nice to have some proof that I have improved over the years. ;>

From that time on I wrote fan fic snips. Seldom finished them. Just wrote the "good stuff" which in those days meant the comfort part of the h/c. I adored h/c. Both physical and emotional. Lived for those tender moments between Pa Cartwright and his sons (Bonanza, which debuted the year I was born) or to see Mike Stone offer fond advice to Steve Keller (Streets of San Francisco). To this day I love a father-son dynamic and love watching Clark with his father as much as I adore the notion of Lex taking Clark to bed.

I think my first unwitting brush with slash was this father-son thing. Anyone who knows the show UFO will remember the episode "Kill Straker." I watched that and immediately started writing away (literally - pre-computers, I did all my work with pencil and paper). I knew I was seeing something (a something Michael Billington, who played Paul Foster to Ed Bishop's Ed Straker, would label as "the greatest example of homoerotic love ever displayed on television") but I tried to fit it into the father-son dynamic. Didn't work. Some 15 years later when I discovered slash, my brain went, "Oh."

When I hit my junior year of high school, the second phase of my writing began. This was the first time a teacher offered a "write something fictional" option to a class project. So, as I would every time I was given that choice, I did. In the process, I created an immortal female. She would change a LOT over the years. So much so that no one would even recognize her from that first story, but that is where she began. From that time on, I wrote her into every fan fic thing I did. With the exception of one X-Men story I did just before Anne's debut, I never finished any of those stories. I didn't really see the point. They were just ways of playing with characters and backgrounds I didn't have to develop as I slowly evolved her. Without exception, I literally trashed all of them in a fit of embarrassment over attempted sex scenes. The old "Oh, my gosh, what if my grandmother sees this!" thing. :> In 1995 I joined GEnie. I chatted a lot on the boards, including the comic book topics. There I was encouraged to post the X-Men thing. I never represented it as anything but a study of a character I was doing and how she fit in with the X-Men universe. One could sneer and call it a Mary Sue thing, and I'm not going to argue one wouldn't be right. It's just that I've always considered representing something as being an X-Men story then letting the original character hijack it to be one of the essential ingredients to a Mary Sue, but if you don't, then I have a Mary Sue to my credit. Somewhere. That's another story I never kept.

For good or ill, that was about to change. Of all things the show Kung Fu: The Legend Continues was the cause. Like any h/c fan, I adored my weekly dose of watching Peter Caine in pain. He suffered so beautifully!

Somewhere along the line, Robert Vaughn and Patrick McNee did their first guest appearance. The board was chatting, laughing about how close the characters were to Solo and Steed, and I did a fast two-paragraph toss off about Illya and Emma arriving to collect their errant partners. Someone begged me to do something more with it. I might have ignored her, but she said, "Please? Something with chains?" Now how could anyone ignore that?

Bam! into my head popped The Kung Fu Affair, which is the only gen story Anne Higgins ever wrote.

On another board, I was being introduced to the concept of slash via Blakes 7 at the same time another group was talking about how UNCLE just couldn't be slashed. I love a challenge.

As I wrote in the intro to Sex, Lies & UNCLE, the plot sprang into my head in the middle of a Saturday night and woke me out of a sound sleep. I tried to go back to sleep. Saturday night or not, I am not a 3 a.m. sort of gal. But no way was my brain going to shut up. So I got out of bed and started writing.

Sex, Lies & UNCLE debuted at Media*West in 1995. The zine containing The Kung Fu Affair (Remote Control #5) also was released at the con. Anne Higgins had arrived. She's been making my life interesting ever since.

Anne
April 28, 2002

Home