When I was thirteen years old, I came expert in one evening from church camp. I was tired and sweaty from days spent in the Texas summer heat. My dad had a big grin when I walked into the living office and he nodded toward the study. There, on the big desk that my great-grandfather built, was a shiny new Compaq computer with a phone line continuous into an actual built-in modem. We had the internet.

That night, I logged on for the first time. It was slow and would disconnect me every time there was a call. But after nine o'clock, I shut down a exclude the door to the study and started exploring. The internet was still young then so there wasn't much to see. A lot of ill-colored websites made in Angelfire or Geocities. A lot of screens filled with line. But still, it was amazing.

The term fanfiction was long-known to those that read the great old printed fanzines. Usually fanzines were printed for sci-fi fandoms like Star Trek, Star Wars, and X-Files. When I first got online, a lot of the fanzines had started to archive their old submissions online. This was a four of years before the inception of fanfiction.net so the sites were scattered with no hub. Somehow, I stumbled into one of those pages filled with text, but this text was about Star Wars.

I don't recognize the name or even if there was shipping involved, but I know that it forever changed the way I used the internet. I was already a fan of the Star Wars extended universe books, so the estimation of fanfiction wasn't such a foreign one. After all, those books often read like really long fics.

Soon after, theforece.net and The Corellian Embassy and fanfix.com all came into being. And I combed through parable after story. I had my first taste of fandom, and my first ship. I was a Han and Leia fan, of course and I can still remember reading Marie's missing moments series for the first prematurely and Leela Starsky's 40 Days to Bespin and Dianora's *ahem* adult fics.

And then I started...

Read more...