I actually started writing fanfic before I knew what that was called. In 2nd grade, we had to keep journals, and I didn't think my life was interesting enough to write about, so I wrote Berenstain Bears fanfiction instead and claimed they were dreams that I had. I only learnt that the term was 'fanfiction' in 5th grade after I did a book report on the TERF-who-shall-not-be-named and discovered FictionAlley and all those other HP fansites. So that particular fandom was where I dipped my toes into really, deliberately writing it myself.

I stumbled across the PPC after finding Miss Cam's website (in the midst of reading LotR fics in 6th grade). My best friend and I would develop our own PPC agents (Agents Lily and Christianne -- Agent Lily would eventually become Lilith Wydenbrooke, and Christianne... stayed the same) taking down Sues called "Snailesha Snailorious" and stuff. I joined the Board... a little bit later. (I say this vaguely because I absolutely lied about my age at the time :P)

Looking back, a good amount of my writing style has been influenced by PPC-esque absurdity and irreverence. I think it's also played a role in the speech ghostwriting I did during my time teaching in Japan. Through fandom I also got experience managing a small business (zines) and other small events (fic exchanges), and made friends with people all over the world, several of whom I would meet in person as I studied and then worked abroad! (Including hS!)

I think a lot of those feelings are going into my current WIP project, since it all started in HP fandom back in the 00s. Seeing how the TERF-who-shall-not-be-named got radicalised in live time in front of the entire world made me want to rewrite the series with a more critical lens on the books themselves--and, ofc, deconstruct some of the popular pureblood culture fic tropes while I'm at it.

So that's where fic has brought me so far!

Like many of you, I invented the concept for myself before I found out anybody else did it.

Around the new year of 2001, my parents invited our old neighbours round. Their daughter was about my age, and clearly had a well-developed addiction to fanfic because she had to borrow our computer to check for new Harry Potter fics during the course of the evening.

To my absolute astonishment (then and now, as it had been MANY years since the latest book) ff.n had a Young Wizards section, with.... like.... three? fics in it, which which I rapidly became obsessed. At some point in the next few years I did a summary search for 'Mary Sue' and found TOS. At some point after that I found a link to the board, where I met hS, married him, moved from Georgia to England to be with him, bore him two children, joined two different professions I would never have considered in the US, and rescued a spooky black cat.

In conclusion, fanfic has affected my life to a detectable degree.

i discovered it pretty recently actually!! a friend introduced it to me right before i happened to join lol, and i ended up loving fanfic!

I mean, I don't exactly know when I found fanfic, but I think I got linked to the first fanfics I actually read through TVTropes. I am... struggling to recall what fics they were? I know I found PPC TOS there but I think I found a few others first?

This is a long period of time to reflect on now. ^_^; Way back in ye olden dayes of the late 90s, I was in middle school (about 12-13), and I got a PC game called Creatures 2. The game had a website, the website had a forum, and the forum had fanfiction. Inspired by the cool stories on the site, I started one of my own, but I never finished it.

I first published a fanfic in the early 2000s, on the Farscape fansite FaDoP (Friends and Defenders of Pilot) and later on Fanfiction.net. I think I even found out about FF.net via FaDoP. I know someone on there was the one to introduce me to the term "Mary Sue," because the OC in that fic is borderline at the least, haha. At the time I didn't quite realize it was something to be avoided, though.

On FF.net, I discovered OFUM, and OFUM led me to the PPC c. June 2003 (at which time I finished high school and then turned 18). It was a few years before I got up the nerve to write a proper PPC story on my own, but I got involved in co-writes (only one of which ever saw the light of day), joined the early archival effort, role-played with my characters, practiced with Fill the Plothole, and eventually got there.

I've typically been more into RP than fanfiction, at least in terms of time spent on it, so it's not surprising to me that I've written more stories for the PPC than any other fandom, or that a bunch of those stories are co-writes. The feeling of collaboration—inhabiting a shared reality, bouncing my bit off the other person's bit, with a goal in mind and/or just to see how it goes—is what I like best.

Apart from the PPC, the only fanfics I've written recently were inspired by Skyrim gameplay, which I guess is me "collaborating" with the game.

As for how it's influenced my life... I admit, I sometimes wonder if I'd have written an original novel by now if I hadn't found fanfiction, but given my track record, I doubt it. Long-term goal-setting and sustained effort are not my strong suits; neither is the sort of confidence in my own ideas that survives very long past the "wouldn't it be cool if" phase.

And of course, recent years have not been good for anyone's mental health, which is not good for creativity. (I am pleased to say I'm better this month than I have been for quite a while. Blog editing didn't work out despite seeming perfect on paper, which is disappointing, but now I'm a pet-sitter and way, way happier. Even an introvert needs to go outside and interact with people more than never! Plus, you know, adorable cats and dogs. ^_^ )

However! I got my first good job through a connection I made in the PPC. I've met lots of people I count as friends here, and would still even if we haven't spoken in years. (E.g., Araeph let me crash on her couch when I was passing through her city last summer, and I let most of a Gathering crash in my apartment!) I've read books and watched shows I might never have considered, because PPCers were into them. I've learned so much about other people, other cultures, and other parts of the world through my PPC connections, and I'm certainly a better person for it.

All in all, my only regret (if you can call it that) is that I haven't been able to write everything I wanted to write precisely when I wanted to because I've had to make sacrifices to "Real Life," whatever the frell that means. ^_~

~Neshomeh

P.S. I started reading Gloaming right after I got it, but got derailed before I finished it. >.> I'll give it another go once I've forgotten enough to appreciate it again!

I first technically got to writing fanfic when I was still in the single-digits. I would draw (very poorly) me and/or my family members as superpowered '''heroes''' going about and beating up fictional characters from series I didn't like - in shoddy checkerboard comic format, because I didn't know how to write.

This eventually led to me realizing I could make stories about things I like as well, so I ended up creating yet another poorly drawn comic, this one about a self-insert's adventures through the Pokemon canon. Granted, I was young and my only experience with the canon was through the trading card games (somehow) so looking back on it it's kind of funny how off base from the actual source material it is. In fact, I've had a WIP mission on a few of my old comics lying around for a while now.

Anyways, eventually I grew older, learned the very basics of creative writing, used it to make more 'beat up the canons'-type fics on random notebooks I had lying around. Then, while I was browsing TV Tropes in my early teens (I think I was looking up something on naginatas?), I ended up on the ol' classic Wiki Walk for a bunch of hours. I saw the Sue-Hunters page, which led to the PPC page, and I think it just appealed to younger me's "killing and mocking 'bad' things seems cool" tendencies because I got to reading missions. I read through Ix's (all of them in like two or three weeks, I think), Voyd's, Nesh's, and a bunch more spinoffs, and the more I read the more I felt I wanted to write like them, I wanted to write funny, snarky meta pieces in this shared universe. So... I ended up seriously stepping into the world of creative writing for the first time, and also learned about the actual widespread phenomena that is fanfic.

And honestly? Joining this group unironically changed my life. It made me realized that I could actually write decently (especially considering I had, like, almost zero training in it when I started), and that I really enjoyed it. I've been plotting out so many ideas for stories that may or may not ever get published, and this hobby as a whole has just brought so many experiences in my life that I don't think I ever would have had if I simply decided to skip reading this group's trope page that one random day. I think it personally helped me change for the better too, but that'd take a bit more detail than I'm ready to share on a fully public forum.

So... yeah, fanfic's definitely left some kind of impact on my life at least. Good memories.

Found the Evil Overlord List on Wikipedia, which led to TVTropes. I discovered My Immortal, and eventually the PPC. So most of my fanfic experience has explicitly been about the critique of badfic. As for affecting my life... well, I've met y'all! (And read Gloaming)

-Ls

It's a bit complicated in my case, 'cause when I was a kid (talking about 6-7 years old!) I already had an habit of imaginining and sometimes writing (with pen and paper!) stories involving me and my favourite animated characters... I was not aware of that being basically fanfiction, or that such a concept existed!

All of that remained "in the drawer", however, for another good 6-7 years, though, as while we got a computer when I was 9 years old (in 2000) and so I did start writing stuff on computer, and saving them as Wordpad then Word docs on floppy discs (There might be people here who never saw one... It's the thing the Save icon is shaped as, for the record), we still had fairly expensive dial-up here at the time, so we only used Internet very occasionally. It wasn't until we got flat-rate ADSL a few years later, when I was 13-14 years old (and by then I also had my own computer) that I properly started looking for stuff about the series I liked online.

I think one of the earlier sites hosting fanworks I stumbled upon was an Italian fanfiction archive called Italian Multi Fanfiction Archive - it's still up somehow despite no activity on the site for almost twenty years, though it clearly was meant for older computers, and it was notable for having very early Internet bright colored backgroudn pages for the various sections, with the one about works by CLAMP notable for being a very obnoxious magenta which I believe is the closest real-world equivalent of Urple - I would spend time reading the stories there, mostly Cardcaptor Sakura ones, only to end up raising my eyes afterwards and feeling that the wall had suddenly turned green... It was also where I had my first experience with bad fanfiction, and years later I took my first "fanfiction disappointment" from there as the subject of my first PPC mission.

The first time I truly got involved in fandom and fanfiction writing was not there on the IM-FA, though, but on the official forum for Moony Witcher's book series Nina, the child of the Sixth Moon, around 2005-2006. In particular April 13th 2006 marks the day I sparked the idea for a massiver crossover fanfiction from which several of my characters originated - including a couple of my PPC agents. Shortly afterwards I got involved in writing on other forums as well, mostly Detective Conan and Knight Rider ones, but it wasn't until 2012 when I began writing IrregularS that I actually posted anything on a "proper" fanfiction archive. Something I didn't repeat until I moved my stuff on AO3 recently.

Since then, though, I mostly focused on my own solo "big projects" and occasional collaborations with friends, with a small parenthesis around 2014 when I worked for some time with the team making the Italian reboot of the Battle Fantasia Project massive crossover fanfiction. Unfortunately, the thing fizzled out around 2015 before really going anywhere, with the sub-arc that I was going to write never leaving the planning stage.