30 Weeks of Fanfic Meme - Week 1
I said on New Year's Day that I had a meme to boost my posting stats this year -- it's the 30 days of fanfic meme that was doing the rounds a couple of years ago but I've decided to do it once a week, which has the side benefit of reducing the impact of overlap in some of the questions and answers.
In case you want to try the meme for yourself, all the questions are in a text file here. (Make sure you scroll down past the "sign up now" ad.)
Week 1: How did you first get into writing fanfic, and what was the first fandom you wrote for? What do you think it was about that fandom that pulled you in?
I've written since I was a child: some poetry (awful emo stuff); some prose (awful Mary-Sue self-insert fics); and some plays (which were … not bad; I remember writing sketches in English and in French for school concerts that were funny and quite well received).
My first fandom was Star Wars, but I wasn't involved in the fandom at all, I just loved the movies and, later, the extended universe novels. I had heard of fanfic, of course, but apart from a published Star Trek anthology in the 70s or 80s I didn't read any until after "The Two Towers" came out and I fell for Haldir (I had read LOTR several times but didn't consider myself a "fan" until that moment). In early 2003 I was looking for pictures and information about Haldir on the net and found links to The Library of Moria … well. Ahem. After the initial shock had subsided I was hooked. Haldir/Celeborn was a prominent pairing at the time and I found the absolutely amazing Heart and Body series by Implacida (another casualty of the Geocities purge, but thank goodness for The Wayback Machine). Ten years later I still think it's one of the best fics ever. There was a lot of LOTR fic being written at that time, and online archives were opening up almost every week, so finding more to read was pretty easy. A few months later I wrote my first official fanfic Hot Summer Night (Haldir/Legolas) and the rest, as they say, is history.
In case you want to try the meme for yourself, all the questions are in a text file here. (Make sure you scroll down past the "sign up now" ad.)
Week 1: How did you first get into writing fanfic, and what was the first fandom you wrote for? What do you think it was about that fandom that pulled you in?
I've written since I was a child: some poetry (awful emo stuff); some prose (awful Mary-Sue self-insert fics); and some plays (which were … not bad; I remember writing sketches in English and in French for school concerts that were funny and quite well received).
My first fandom was Star Wars, but I wasn't involved in the fandom at all, I just loved the movies and, later, the extended universe novels. I had heard of fanfic, of course, but apart from a published Star Trek anthology in the 70s or 80s I didn't read any until after "The Two Towers" came out and I fell for Haldir (I had read LOTR several times but didn't consider myself a "fan" until that moment). In early 2003 I was looking for pictures and information about Haldir on the net and found links to The Library of Moria … well. Ahem. After the initial shock had subsided I was hooked. Haldir/Celeborn was a prominent pairing at the time and I found the absolutely amazing Heart and Body series by Implacida (another casualty of the Geocities purge, but thank goodness for The Wayback Machine). Ten years later I still think it's one of the best fics ever. There was a lot of LOTR fic being written at that time, and online archives were opening up almost every week, so finding more to read was pretty easy. A few months later I wrote my first official fanfic Hot Summer Night (Haldir/Legolas) and the rest, as they say, is history.