Once upon a time I was a tiny Rina writing FF4 fanfic. Wait, that hasn't changed.
stealth_noodle asked, "I have been reminiscing a bit lately about my Internet salad days and would love to see a post about your early online experiences with fandom, the first fic you ever posted online, etc."
Early fandom! Man. My very first experience with fandom was before I even knew what fandom was; I wrote fic for Dragonriders of Pern which is long since lost to the hell of forgotten hard drives. The last time I remember touching it I was in...eighth grade? So that would have been 1996. I just wanted to write about dragons.
My first Internet experience with fandom was a fansite for the show Roar that had fanfic. This was when I was a freshman in high school, and the site was on Angelfire. (o ye days of Internet past...) My friend kruammitak and I used to write fic bits on our TI-82s and pass them in the hallways between classes, because clearly we were definitely fooling our teachers with our steadfast attention to our calculators. Definitely. We started our own little fansite on Angelfire, with a piece of FF6 fic that was....of dubious quality. That would've been 1998 or so, and I am fairly certain that was my first-ever fic posted online.
Then I discovered Yahoo! Chat's Game Room in 1999, and through that I discovered Fanfiction.net (ah, the Pit of Voles.) Through tetsuokatata, who was a friend of mine in the GR, I was introduced to drawsmcgraw, who introduced me to LJ in 2001. (I do not quite have a user ID number there under a quarter million, but I'm damn close.) Like a lot of social networking, my initial time on LJ was just keeping up with the lives of people I knew from chat.
From about 2003-2005 or so I really rather fell off the face of writing; I would still read periodically, but I wasn't really in fandom. Then in 2005 I think
celeloriel linked me to a piece of Kefka fic by
ponderosa, and suddenly I was back in fandom. I joined a zillion and one prompt-writing communities on LJ (mostly run by
shanaqui) and I met
seventhe and discovered
cypher's fic, which led me into a half-dozen fandoms outside FF that I never would have touched if not for that.
Fandom has been a huge part of my life since I was ten or so, even though I didn't always know it by that name or understand the ways it was shaping me. At age 31, looking back at my high school and college writing, I can cringe at how unpolished it was, but I can also see the way some themes have been with me forever. (And even if my sentence structures were clumsy and my original characters were awful expys of fandom characters and my plot was hilariously terrible, I finished a novel of about 60K words at age 12, and that's something. And the base ideas of that novel were sufficently not terrible that I was able to reuse them later, in a better format.)
Fandom is how I met both of my maids of honour; fandom is how I made this huge circle of friends who I love and who make me laugh and who are there when things are crappy. All in all, a good series of life choices on my part.
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