To quote a line out of Hook: "I hate, I hate, I HATE Peter Pan!" This has been the way of it all my life. I first read James Barrie's book when I was about five and I hated it, I saw the Disney cartoon around the same age and hated it, I saw the Mary Martin musical version of it not much later and hated it... But for some odd reason, I loved Hook. To be perfectly honest, this may have had something to do with the fact that I first saw Spielberg's take on the story when I was awfully darned sick and in need of something uplifting. I had been intrigued by the commercials and interviews and promotional stuff I'd seen for the movie when it first came out, but a lot of people told me I shouldn't bother to go see it in the theater, it was getting terrible reviews, and it stank. I should have considered the sources -- these were some of the same people who had convinced me not to see BTTF and Ghostbusters on the big screen, choices I have always regretted, because effects movies are something that can be considerably enhanced by big screen viewing. But, like an idiot, I listened, and never paid attention to the fact that none of these jerks had actually seen the movie. They were just spouting what they'd heard from other people or from critics, whom I have never trusted.  All this has taught me to quit listening to anyone but myself when it comes to deciding whether or not I want to go see a movie in the theaters.

Early in 1992, I fell victim to the crypto curse -- cryptosporidiosis, caused by a parasite that had gotten into the Milwaukee water supply and made nearly half a million people sick, to varying degrees (I personally was laid up with it for three weeks, and felt the effects for months afterward because I have a messed up immune system. To this day, I don't think I've entirely gotten rid of the bug). JR had to come pick me up at my job to drive me to the doctor's office because I'd collapsed the minute I arrived at work.  The doctors (then thinking I had a bad case of intestinal flu because they hadn't realized the parasite was out there, yet) sent me home to try to get better. On the way home, we stopped and picked up a couple of videos to keep me entertained when I wasn't in the bathroom (crypto is a really disgusting bug). One was Hook; I watched, and I instantly fell in love. (The fact that I had no previously established affections for what had gone before helped  immensely, I suspect. I didn't go in expecting or wanting to see the wrong things.)

Although I personally consider the casting of Hook to be absolutely flawless -- and I adore John Williams' soundtrack for it; it has the only piece of music that always gives me goosebumps -- I readily admit this was a movie with big problems. The story dragged on much longer than necessary; some judicious rewriting and editing could've helped immensely (I mean, really, it took Peter about an hour and a half just to remember who he was. Just a tad long...), and there were other plot holes and obvious excesses. But the heart of the story -- the value of imagination, creativity, and the Inner Child to an adult -- touched upon themes very near and dear to my heart. I strongly feel that far too many people let go of these things when they "grow up," because they don't understand that growing up doesn't have to mean growing old and dull in one's heart. I never had any particular intention to write any fanfic in this genre, since I figured the movie had pretty much said what needed to be said and that was the end of it. But unbeknownst to me, the  Compost Heap I call my brain was cooking up something. When I was writing "I'll Be Home for Christmas," I needed an actual name for the lawyer who was working with Doc in his new fusion reactor business. Since I'd decided it should be someone in a larger but nearby city with appropriate corporate offices for reactor-type business, I instantly chose San Francisco. And when the notion of using an already extant character from some other genre just as an in-joke throwaway popped into my head, Peter Banning immediately came to mind. I suspect this was due to the Spielberg Connection, and the fact that Doc's personality has a little bit of Peter Pan in it, the adult who adamantly does not conform or "grow up" the way other people think he should. I intended it to be nothing more than a one-time-only joke, really. But then one day, while bored out of my brain at work (it happened a lot at that particular job), I realized it would be easy to fit the two universes together. Very easy. Too easy. The idea for Back to Neverland popped out in one day. I tinkered with the plot for a few weeks, fine tuning it, but it changed very little after that point. On February 13, 1993, I started to write it.

Unfortunately, I got exactly one and a half chapters into it when it stalled (out of fear, I think; I couldn't believe I was actually writing this thing), and soon thereafter, the Big Writer's Block set in fast. I didn't touch it again for over five years. Strangely enough, however, when the Block began to thaw in August of 1998, Back to Neverland (originally dubbed "The VERY Weird Story") was the second thing I attempted to restart -- and the first story I'd been able to completely finish for over five years, thus shattering the block, hopefully for good. If not for this tale, none of the other things I've written since would have been completed; some would never have started. So weird as this novel may be, the rest of my writing owes it a great deal. Absurd and trite thought it may seem, it melted the Block but good, and I hope the flow will continue for a good, long time. So why, you may ask, did this thing sit in limbo even after it was finished? There are a number of reasons, but two are most responsible:

1). I was very uncertain how well it would be received by BTTF fans. Let's face it, Hook was not Spielberg's most popular movie, and a lot of people raked it over the coals. Also, some people would tend to consider the genre too childish for a crossover between the two to work, and it might not be everyone's cup of tea -- especially since the story really only has three main characters, Doc, Peter, and Tink. Everyone else comes and goes -- mostly goes -- and most of the story does not take place in the World As We Know It. If you aren't willing to suspend your disbelief to accept this, then you're going to have problems with it, so you might not want to go through the effort of reading it (and it is long). But this is NOT a children's story. There are children in it, but it's really primarily about two very different and yet very similar adults from odd backgrounds coming to grips with their own feelings toward age, responsibility, and the possible downsides of growing up and growing old.

2). This is the biggie: When he died, James Barrie, the author of the original Peter Pan, bequeathed the rights to it to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. This is a real place that does real work in helping the sick children of Great Britain and the world, and I felt like I was cheating them somehow by not paying them something for using even this very-changed version of Peter, Neverland, and the inhabitants thereof that Spielberg depicted in Hook. Since I make no money off of this, the best I can offer them here is publicity. If you are interested in seeing what the hospital is up to today, check them out on the Internet; they do indeed have a website: http://www.ich.bpmf.ac.uk/ and click on the "about us" pointer to see information about the hospital itself (the site is primarily meant for researchers, but it does have info for the general public).

Granted, very little of what I'm using in this story has strong ties to that original book/play. Peter and the remaining denizens of Neverland aren't what they used to be (not even Neverland itself is; Hook took some liberties on all accounts), the Lost Boys of that first story are gone... Tinkerbell's probably about as close to the same as anyone gets, only she talks a lot more than she ever did in the book. I drew from a number of different sources when I wrote this, particularly in regards to how I chose to depict things like the Indians and the faeries (some of it came from what I could remember of Fox's defunct "Peter Pan and the Pirates" cartoon series, others from legends, and my fevered imagination). But pulling Doc into this was so easy, it was a little scary. Even before I finished it, I had decided this story would never see the light of day. Really. My weird crossovers often have great meaning only to me, because they're frequently the product of strange night dreams that process everything that's been running through my head for weeks, or daydreams that grow out of boredom. I had definitely consigned this novel to the "no one beyond close friends will ever see it" pile -- so much so that I went and lifted parts of the first chapter and used them in another story, Running Out of Time (which is why some of the first chapter may seem so familiar; I used it in that story to refer to certain events that actually happened just before this story). But the more I thought about it (and the more the five people who've read it have leaned on me), the more I realized there were things here that I couldn't easily pull out and use elsewhere, things that I felt were important to all of what I'm trying to say with my BTTF stories, so I finally gave up and decided to go for it. As Doc would say, what the hell. In the revisions, I chose to throw in a little twist, just to be perverse: This is sort of a pre-2001 story as it would have happened in the revised past after the events of 2001 depicted at the end of No Time Like the Present. Sort of like going back and writing a story about Marty's childhood as it would have happened after he went back in time and changed things for his parents in 1955 (as I did, more or less, in "Twice in a Lifetime"). Do not ask me why I decided to do that. I have a very strange Muse, which is why I call her Dementia.

So here it is, in all its dubious glory. (And I use "faery" rather than "fairy" as a whim, nothing more. It's an acceptable alternate spelling, an older version of the same word that I felt had a better connection to legends about the Land of Faery than the often trivialized versions of what people today call "fairy tales.") If nothing else, reading it will eventually tell you how and why Doc wound up hiring Peter to be his patent attorney, and later made him his business partner. It made sense to me at the time. These days, I've really gotta wonder....

Enjoy (and don't shoot me...)!