TLDR; Dana and I wrote a story together a couple decades ago that is perfectly suited to Halloween reading.
When I first began writing and posting LOTR fanfic in 2003, Dana (who lived on the other side of the country) came into my life. She was lively and mischievous, while I felt awkward and shy by contrast. We connected on LiveJournal, if I'm remembering right, where there was a lively LOTR fanfic community, and soon we were exchanging messages and then talking on the phone for hours, mostly about LOTR and our love of hobbits.
Dana's writing style was markedly different from mine. For starters, she was concise, and I was long-winded. She excelled in telling stories in the first person, while I felt more comfortable with writing in third person omniscient style (at least, that's what I think it's called). Dana introduced me to drabbles and the challenge of encapsulating an entire story in 100 words. (Our mutual friend Dreamflower later acquainted me with other challenging forms, such as dribbles.)
Dana loved to issue challenges. For example, she'd provide a list of seemingly unrelated words that all had to appear at least once in the challenge story. (Several of those challenges are in my list of stories here at SoA.) I remember how my mixed-up pairing of Pippin with Estella rather than Diamond caught Dana's attention, and she often asked for more Pippin-Estella stories, as well as situations where one character or another would get tied up and need rescuing, even if they ended up rescuing themselves. We had a great deal of fun recounting off-the-wall stories over the phone: hobbit pirates and tenth-walker stories among them. My original silly tenth-walker story involved a flea that lived in Gandalf's left eyebrow... but eventually, I branched out to telling Dana "Bill" stories, including my theory that the reason the birds that flew over Hollin didn't see Bill (and the pony seemed to appear and disappear in the film) was because Frodo jammed the Ring on Bill's ear to make the pony invisible since the pony couldn't exactly hide under a bush like the other Travellers.
Another quality of Dana's that I appreciate is her kindness. She was invariably understanding and incredibly gracious, as well as always encouraging. I am a better person for knowing her.
Sadly, we lost touch when I went back to work full time and had little time or energy for fanfic. I'd love to connect again and catch up... I wonder what fandom she might be writing for now? I love the way she writes.
One day, Dana challenged me to write a horror story. I don't do well with horror; in fact, I gave up watching horror films, along with reading Stephen King novels, a long time ago. Peter Jackson's orcs are about as far as I go in that direction these days. Dana's much braver than I am! So together, we wrote the perfect Halloween tale... even though when I look at the posting date, we must have written it in June. Ah, well.
Every Halloween since my return to reading and posting fanfic, I've thought of The Other and wanted to publish it for more readers to discover. I held off for years because I wanted to talk to Dana about it first. More recently, I've been hearing more and more disturbing rumours about the archive where we originally posted the story in 2003, raising fears that the archive – the only place where The Other could be found, at least until today – might go the way of other archives, and the story would be lost. After re-reading, I think it has held up pretty well (even if I do say so myself, LOL). Thus, I've decided to cross-post this story to SoA, for I'd hate for it to disappear into the ether.
***