I was looking online for information about the last book in the series and found something that was most certainly NOT canon, but I read it and wanted to read more. And then I wondered if there was anything for Harry Potter, and it was like I'd found a buried treasure chest. It was so amazing- and then I saw one summary that looked pretty good, though I didn't know what the word at the end, 'yaoi', meant.

That kind of scared me off for a few months.

Then I thought, if all these people can write Harry Potter fanfiction, I wanted to do it, too. I'm still hoping to one day complete the fifteen-part series I have planned out, but first I think I'll go back and rewrite the first two and a half stories I already did. The OC isn't super-Sued, but it could definitely use work. Her Marauder nickname is Ebony. That probably tells you enough... ^_^'

I first started reading fanfiction either on K/Sarchive or the House squidge archive. It may have been K/S, introduced to me from the wikipedia page (my first ever ship, followed by Huddy from House MD)
I think my first fanfictions were K/S. I was being bullied at the time so I ended up reading a lot more M-rated stuff than I probably should have at the age of ten. It was my refuge, and I still struggle with an unhealthy addiction with the stuff.
My first fanfiction was a Warrior Cats/House MD fusion (yes, yes, quite seriously) and it was AWFUL. AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL. Thankfully I never posted it. The other fics I wrote and actually posted were actually awful.
The fanfiction.net/ao3 handle LightDarkPheonix comes from my obsession with phoenixes, the misspelling dates all the way back to my second account on FF.net (I abandoned my first one because of aforementioned House MD badfics).
To my frustration I can never show what I write to my parents because they a)think all fanfiction is 200k of NSFU stuff b)they seem to be opposed to gay pairings, despite not being homophobic, and all of my fics are gay pairings.

I only learned about fanfiction in maybe 2008. I believe the Sprout was already born. it could have been a year or so before that though, I am absolutely horrible with hammering events into a timeline. (I got the idea to check when I made the ffnet account, but CANNOT get logged in. Serious aggravation.)

I belonged to a writing group aimed at authors trying to get published. When someone mentioned fanfiction. I of course had to check it out.

I honestly have no idea why I ever tried it a second time. Maybe morbid curiosity. Maybe I have a masochistic streak?

Being the first time I read a fanfic, I had no idea what all those terms that are common in summaries meant. This a couple of clean-up-TOS-breaking-fics purges ago on ffnet, so I blithely go to the LOTR section and limit it to Faramir fics.

Let's just leave it as that I learned what slash meant, and I've always really, really wished those fics hadn't gotten purged so that I could hit them with the Department of Bad Slash.

I've still never really gotten into reading LOTR fanfic. I tried NCIS eventually and Stargate and the rest is history.



Now, not really fanfic, but when I was younger I had a seriously overactive imagination that would scare me at night, so I would make up stories. Mostly about Star Trek TOS, ironically enough. (No, I'm not THAT old. It was on re-runs, but this was before Next Generation.) I never wrote any of those down. When I got up into about 5th grade I took characters that I liked from TV shows, kept basically the names and personalities and stuck them all into my own original world. Even as a little kid is made me uncomfortable to be messing about in someone else's sandbox like that. I've only started writing fanfic this year, because of that.

Later, I changed their names and everything else until they had no resemblance, but the origins all go back to a ridiculously bad one season cop show that I obsessed over in 5th grade. Benjamin Bratt was on that show though, so you know, hey I still think he's good looking. Maybe it wasn't so ridiculous, even though I didn't really think in those terms then.

My Fanfiction experience... The memories.

I wrote my first fanfic before I read any. My first one was a Skyrim fic. It's called Skyrim Allegiance, and I am currently redeveloping it, along with just about all my fics. I will need them later for Imaginations Collide, but they are currently not so good. I wrote them a few years back, took a break, then read them again. But, I'm pretty confident that I never wrote a Mary Sue or Gary Stu. I got close a few times, but never actually did it.

The first fanfic I wrote was also a Skyrim story. I forget the title, but it's dead now. It was a story about an OC rebuilding the Dark Brotherhood by accepting numerous OC's from readers. I submitted one, too. A psychotic who would brutally murder anyone he was attracted to. I believe his name was Nikita Contortus.

And that is my fanfiction experience.

I don't really have much fanfic writing experience, but my first fanfic I ever READ was a Naruto Sasori/Deidara slashfic that probably needs to be sporked a little bit. After that I branched out, finding new fics in many different fandoms, and a couple decent crossovers as well.

The first fanfiction I wrote, if you could call it that, were a trio of horrid Red Alert 2, Worms and Bionicle not-even-stories that never made it past the two-paragraph stage I wrote back then in second grade's creative writing lesson.
I didn't start reading fanfiction until I chanced upon the PPC, IIRC.

My first experience of fanfiction was around 1999 or 2000, when I discovered the alt.drwho.creative newsgroup, back in its heyday. I loved reading the "IA" (Internet Adventure) round robin fics, where writers would take it in turns to write one chapter each. The group also had Jerri Massi's "Always the Third Doctor" fics, and the surreal alternate universe of "This Time Round". Great stuff.

But I only lurked, and never joined in. Like I said before, for me creative writing was just something we were forced to do at school, and not anything I could ever imagine myself doing if I didn't have to!

Star Fox is where I started, although I can't give you a precise date or time.
I've been working on the same fic for what, years, now and am apparently fated to never get anywhere with it. I'm not writing it down, at least.

That's all there is. Being who I am I generally don't read fanfic that is made with any level of deep thought put into it - nor do I read the obnoxiously bad kind.
The latter is naturally disgusting, whereas all the former does is inspire envy and contempt. If the subject at hand genuinely interests me I can't help but despise those who do better than I - a notable exception being Marauder Shields, which I will follow until its end.

I form hypotheses, theories, complex systems and simple one-frame images.
I never put any of it to paper. I don't think I ever will.

My first encounter with fanfiction was sometime in the 80s, thanks to an acquaintance who collected PWP fanzines. (And badly written PWP at that -- I could be wrong, but I don't think porn is supposed to bore the reader.) It took me longer to start reading internet fanfiction, because I had to figure out that there were non-porn fics first.

Writing ... while I've got several ideas, I haven't posted anything. A lot of my "write fiction" impulse gets channeled into writing gaming scenarios instead.

It all began with The Light Fantastic. Waaay back in the last milennium, a schoolfriend suggested I should read it. I did, and now I own every single Discworld novel. ;)

After some time, I was browsing Discworld sites on the internet (I remember The L-Space Web in particular), and happened across a small Discworld fanfic site. Well, I know now it was small... at the time, it was the only one I knew existed.

At around the same time, I was producing unshared self-insert fics of my own, in Pern and Star Wars (and possibly a couple of others... not sure). I still have them somewhere - they're pretty bad.

Late in 2002, I developed an actual online presence, in the form of my very first email address - and yes, that was when I became Huinesoron. I created a Hotmail account in order to talk to a friend about The Two Towers over the Christmas holidays. As you can see, I was already a big Lord of the Rings fan - I'd read it since I was a child - but hadn't yet started on the histories.

Then, and it must have been around the same time, another friend (that's three, if you're counting!) noticed me on the Discworld fanfic site and directed me to Fanfiction.net. My mind practically exploded, and it didn't take long for me to abandon Discworld fanfic to its fate (though I still retain a certain fondness for it - hence my writing OFUDisc) and dive headlong into the LotR section.

My first published story came about in March 2003, because I was bored at a Scout meeting. We were making pancakes - which means, two people were making pancakes at any one time while the rest of us stood around - and I decides to write something; I put Legolas in it because I knew he was the most popular character.

Pancakes! hit fifty chapters. It has over a thousand reviews. I'd say that 'popular' thing worked. :D

The next step came about because I couldn't spell. Well, I could spell most things - but I was positive that Legolas' father was named 'Thanduril' (as opposed to 'Thranduil'; my entire family did the same thing with a certain headmaster named 'Dumblemore'). So Thanduril went into a story - I forget which - and someone pointed out that he was a mini-Balrog. They directed me to OFUM, which I devoured.

It was through OFUM that I found the PPC stories, which I also devoured - and I was nowhere near to getting full. Vaguely inspired by Jay and Acacia, I started writing a spinoff to 'Pancakes!', about an organisation named Ispace.

This very Board noticed me, in the person of Vemi, and on September 8th, 2003, Hellga (I'd forgotten that fact, but the review is definitely her) invited me to come join the Board. On a dark autumn's evening, I looked it up - and found that Vemi assumed I was female. ;) So my first post was protesting that I was actually male, and not ripping the PPC off, honest.

And... I stuck around. I made friends - within three months I was chatting regularly over MSN with Kaitlyn, who I eventually married. I founded a new department (DOGA) early in 2004, started writing Histories very soon after... and just kept on sticking around. Now I'm far and away the most prolific PPC writer (though not with the most missions).

My other fanfic hasn't been quite as numerous. By April '04 I'd completely stopped writing, and when I resumed, I made a new account to escape my fangirls (oh yes, I had fangirls). That was September '04.

The last significant change came in 2005. The Reorganisation had stalled out some months earlier, and I was on a hiatus of sorts. Somewhere in that break, something must have happened to change my writing style. Everything before that point, I cringe a little to re-read; everything after it, I'm okay with. I think it was at that point - after the hiatus, when I picked up Reorg again (by myself; no cowriter) - that I started writing Narto and Lou's missions. They're all in the new style, I believe.

So that's me. Didn't expect quite that many words, huh?

hS

My first experience with fanfiction came, oddly enough, while I was in my second year of law school, so in a few months, it will be three years since I've read my first fanfic!

IIRC, I first heard of fanfic while I was much younger. After I read the last book of the Animorphs series, it mentioned somewhere in the afterword that there were being fanfictions made picking up from the series' cliffhanger ending.

Fast forward all those years to law school, and I was looking for something to read. I remembered that snippet of information and started looking for Animorphs fanfic. I eventually ran across an unfinished goodfic by Blue Dragon: The Kelbrid War: How to shatter trust. TVTropes eventually led me to the PPC.

Of course, I've only recently started writing fanfiction; I have a crossover in the works. It is a Bakugan/Pokemon crossover titled The Vexos Chronicles. I have quite a few stories planned for the series (yes, it will be a series, God willing), and hopefully, my entry into fanfiction will be with a bang.

I wrote my first two in fifth grade. One was a Pokemon fanfic in which a girl got sucked into the anime (rewritten many times since and still messy) and the second one was a Neopets fic intended to be a grand tropical/alien adventure. I think.

My first experience reading fanfiction was probably on the website "The Cave of Dragonflies." It has a whole section devoted to the author's fanfiction, which is pretty good if sometimes morbid. I particularly remember her two longer fanfics, "The Quest for the Legends" and "Morphic", as inspiring to me. I still have a large Word file on my computer containing profiles for twelve different human/Pokemon hybrid OCs I've not really written a story for. (I'd make one a prospective agent if I weren't slightly convinced I wrote a band of Sues and Stus.)

Also, I think I joined deviantART around the same time (2011/2012). The first fanfic on the site I liked enough to favorite a chapter of was "Follow Me" by SakuraMota (read it, it's good). She inspired me, avid Soul-as-player/Silver shipper I was, to write a fic of my own starring them. (It's currently two and a half chapters long, outlined for far longer, and awaiting a rewrite as a college AU. Don't ask.)

That was... a long time ago...

Technically I've been writing fanfiction since I was about eight in the form of poems, but I didn't think of it like that. Still, it's rather pleasant to be able to look back at what is technically my first fanfic and bathe in the roaring success that turned out to be. Much better than all the Redwall drivel I followed it up with. When I was twelve I happened to mention it to my mom and she explained the concept of fan fiction to me. A couple of years later I was looking for a guide on molespeech and ran across an online Redwall-based community, which I joined without hesitation. Most of the stuff on that site was badfic, and I've actually considered linking the whole fanfic page board-wards, except some of my first work was on it and I'm too embarrassed to let anyone see. (Even though it deserves sporkage.)

About the time I started writing LotR and Star Wars fanfic I quit the internet for a while, and when I came back I'd improved significantly. Among other things I had started writing original fiction and figured out that no, actually, Mary Sues weren't such a great type of character.

I don't actually remember what happened next very clearly, but it involved a lot of anonymous stalking of ff.net and AO3 as well as *grimace* written guides on determining what exactly is in a fanfic by the summary and title. (Fortunately I never managed to share these with anyone.)

Anyway, I guess that sort of brings me up to the present, where my primary form of recreation is writing songs making fun of bad fanfic. And writing introspective pieces I never finish.

The first fanfiction I read that I remember was some Redwall piece that had a tolerably good story and pretty neat characters but was almost as unintelligible as My Immortal. I wish I could find it again, because in hindsight it was pretty amusing. (At the time I was still naïve enough to believe everyone could spell words like father, so it all came as something of a shock.)

The first fanfic I wrote (while knowing it was fanfic) was a weird take on a Rose!Lives that I am forever ashamed of. I retained some of the ideas, though, and twisted it into another story that is pretty much unrecognizable as the same story and almost doesn't even qualify as a Rose!Lives anymore. So technically I'm still writing it. But not really.

Slightly amusing unrelated: I told some dude that I wrote fanfiction in one conversation. In a different conversation, I mentioned that I didn't appreciate reading sex scenes. It was almost impossible for him to reconcile these two ideas in his head, because somewhere he got the idea that it's not technically fanfiction if it doesn't include sex.

Yet another dude, immediately upon discovering that I wrote fanfiction, demanded to know whether or not I shipped. His definition of shipping turned out to be Aragorn/Legolas.

I think people who do not read or write fanfiction don't actually know what it is.

I first really came across fanfiction in about September 2012, Up til then the only thing I really did online was RP, then one of my friends from the site I RPed on mentioned fanfiction, I think he was talking about some Pokemon fanfic or something, and I decided to check it out although I quickly became more interested in Harry Potter fanfiction. It also coincided with another person I knew advertising their writings on fictionpress via the same forums and so I became interested in fanfiction.

My first attempt at writing fanfiction can currently be found on the Claimed Badfic list, which gives you an idea of how bad it was. The spelling and grammar for the first half of it or so is appalling and the latter half is only a bit better. It also included entering 2 new races into the Harry Potter continuum (Succubi and Elves if you're wondering) re-hashed quite a bit of magical history, although I did try and work it into the gaps left by canon. Oh and I created the "most adorable mini-Aragog", Hugglepuff.

I can't remember the first bit of fanfiction I read, but one of the fanfics I did read early on, and can remember was The Return of the Marauders by TheLastZion. I re-read it occasionally, it's got bad grammar at points and some of the characters do have some Sue-ish traits amongst other things, but as an early fanfic writer it did inspire me, and make me aspire to become a better writer.

On the topic of early fanfics, whilst I was looking at joining the PPC I browsed the Unclaimed List a couple of times. And on looking down the Unclaimed badifc list, I noted a HP fanfic named "Harry Potter and the Guardian of Hogwarts", which to most people doesn't mean much. To me however, whose first fanfic was called "Harry Potter and the Guardians of Hogwarts" it freaked me out for a bit, before I realized it was a completely different fic.

Storme Hawk
Who's trip down memory lane has sufficiently distracted him from revision.

I think I first learned fanfiction was a thing in middle school, thanks to the Creatures computer games. That would be about 1998, give or take. That was also about the time I was learning the Internet was a thing, and spent my some of my free time hanging out in MSN chat rooms and stuff. (Hey guys, who else remembers a/s/l queries being commonplace and not automatically creepy and stalkerish?)

Somehow, I made my way to a Creatures fan forum and found that people had written stories based on the games. It kind of blew my mind. I don't remember any specific thoughts, but I used up a lot of paper printing off a particularly good series of long-ish fics—and I still have them! I was already something of a writer (so my parents and teachers told me!), so fanfic seemed like an awesome way for me to get involved in the community. I started writing my own fic pretty damn quick, but I never finished it. Middle school was not a great time for me writing-wise, at least not until the 8th grade, when I actually had a competent English teacher.

1999-2000, my freshmen year in high school, was when I got into Farscape, though, and that changed everything. I got involved with a little Pilot fansite called FaDoP (Friends and Defenders of Pilot), and they were the most amazing group of people I'd ever met online. Fanfic was definitely in, and I wrote up a decent-length fic—about 20 pages, single-spaced with indented paragraphs, definitely the longest thing I'd ever written at the time. And that one I actually finished, with an alternative ending and a sequel, even.

And that's how I learned about Mary Sues. ^_^

The FaDoPer who pointed out that my OC might be a Sue did so in pretty much the nicest way possible. I think they were going by the then-standard "idealized version of the author/person the author wishes they could be" definition, to which I agreed that, yep, that sounded about right! I was a bit defensive about it, as I recall, so my agreement was sort of a passive-aggressive attempt to own whatever so-called "flaws" people were finding with my work which was obviously perfect, thereby transmuting them into deliberate style choices that I totally did on purpose for a reason so don't judge me... but still, at least I didn't throw a tantrum or anything.

Anyway, I think I found out about fanfiction.net from my fellow writing-inclined FaDoPers, and that Farscape fic is the first thing I posted there. Apparently this was in early 2002, which I'm pretty sure is a good bit after I actually wrote it, but that's beside the point.

By then I was heavily involved in role-playing, mostly on Neopets, and I wrote a handful of fics inspired by or directly based on what I was getting up to in RPs. In particular, I started writing a massive Harry Potter epic... that I never finished. I think I discovered OFUM not very long after discovering ff.net, and through OFUM I found the PPC, so I'd heard of "canon," and I wanted my story to harmonize the events of the RP with the books as much as possible, so when new books came out and changed everything, it was difficult to recover my momentum.

Plus, by 2004 I was pretty entrenched on the Board, and PPC stuff took over a good bit of my free time. I remember starting and never finishing a fair few fics between 2003 and 2006-ish, but since I'm pretty sure they were all garbage, that doesn't bother me. I did write another Farscape fic in 2005, after the miniseries came out, and I've poked at the Epic Potter RP Fic, but basically my interest in writing my own fanfic petered out in favor of writing PPC stuff. It's a lot more fun writing for an audience who knows you, likes you, and is generally willing to give meaningful feedback. And here we are!

~Neshomeh, who wrote a lot in this post, jeez.