A Journey Through Fandom
When I was thirteen years old, I came poorhouse 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 space 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 direction 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 the door to the memorize 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 school-book. 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 Hero 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 yoke 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 Woman Wars.
I don't remember 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 territory books, so the idea of fanfiction wasn't such a foreign one. After all, those books often read like really long fics.
Right away after, theforece.net and The Corellian Embassy and fanfix.com all came into being. And I combed through story after story. I had my first taste of fandom, and my first set sail. I was a Han and Leia fan, of course and I can still remember reading Marie's missing moments series for the first time and Leela Starsky's 40 Days to Bespin and Dianora's *ahem* mature fics.
And then I started...
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