Wow, the memories this thread evokes!
My VERY first fan-anything was a fan-written Star Trek script that someone in my university dormitory wrote and let me have a look at. We're talking type-written, back in 1992 or 1993 or maybe earlier. I'd just started reading the Trek novels at the public library, even before I started collecting the books. I didn't even have a TV at the time - we didn't have one when I was a kid, either. I'd seen an ep or two of the original Trek when I'd been at people's houses, that was it, so the novels were how I got started with Trek for the most part. Anyway, it was my friend's roommate or suitemate, or something like that, who wrote this script, and I remember thinking, "Wow, I'm not the only person who likes this show here at this school" - this was a very conservative religiously affiliated university, and I'd figured everyone would be anti-scifi there.
To make a long story short, a year or so later I bought my own TV (a VERY BIG DEAL <VBVEG>) and discovered that I could get The Next Generation on it, so I started watching the show. Of course I was hooked already, thanks to the novels. Then I moved out of the dorm and into my own little efficiency apartment, so efficient that someone had made it by building a wall across the back of their garage, with the main entrance through the garage. (It was long and narrow, perhaps three mattresses wide?, with the bed space in a loft above the garage storage space on the other side, that you had to crawl up a ladder to get into bed. I had a little short love seat sofa that I preferred to sleep on, even though my feet stuck up in the air and the arm of the sofa was my pillow and I often woke up with a crick in my neck. There was a closet on one end of the room whose door often came off the track and I had to get my landlord, who lived in the house whose garage I was living in, to fix it every time. At the other end was a miniscule kitchen sink behind what used to be the back garage door, but was now my back door out into the back yard - there was practically no elbow room, let alone dish-draining space, because he had put a tiny little bathroom in the rest of that space. But you had to go out into the garage and open the bathroom door from out there with a separate key - I hated having to go to the toilet in the middle of the night that winter; this was Michigan, btw!
The bathroom was so narrow that if you were sitting on the toilet and you tried to lean over to look between your feet, your head bumped the wall. You had to turn sideways to get past the toilet to get into the shower, which you could barely turn around in...)
Anyway, I put my TV up on the loft shelf, and I started taping the show in earnest, and buying novels and reading them at an alarming rate. (Alarming because first, I didn't have the money to spend on them, and second, I didn't have the time to read them - I spent time reading that I should have spent studying or practicing...) About that time, I started discovering the internet - I had been on various forerunners briefly the year before, doing research for my music courses, but about that time the internet started getting interesting. I'd found some Trek sites before, and some fic too, but it was just a novelty, since the type of 'net we had before that was really awkward to navigate. (I don't know if the older members will remember it - it was about 1990 or 1991 if memory serves. I don't really remember the details myself, but do remember that at that time it was a lot easier to just look up the books and the microfiche and other stuff, than to try to navigate that old 'net) About this time, too, the university computer lab, which before had been mostly a glorified typewriter room and other computer applications centre, got the internet, and we students were allowed to access it! So I started spending time searching for the titles of all the Star Trek episodes that I had missed so far. That's about all I did with Trek on the internet for a couple of years...
One day a girl looked over my shoulder and commented that I must be a Star Trek fan, too. We struck up a conversation, and lo and behold, she was a scriptwriter-wannabe (now that I think about it, might she have been the one who wrote that first script I saw? dunno), and we became good friends. I taught her to play chess, and she took me to my first Trek convention, and when I had my first Trek dream (I don't have to ask if you've ever had a dream about your fandoms - I suppose most of us have had them
) I told her about it. She suggested I write it down, and so I started to play around with the idea. I'd read a lot of Trek books by now, and I fancied that I could write a story like that - there were a lot of bad Trek novels in the beginning, if those of you who are also Trek fans will remember, and I thought I could do at least as well as those bad ones, maybe better.
Meantime, in 1994 I had to quit grad school due to lack of financing, and I returned home to look for work. I kept buying books - the older ones from a used book shop near my new place, the newer ones from the bookstore in the mall across the road. I made friends with both the used book seller and one of the clerks in the bookstore, and spent a lot of time chatting with them while I was in their places browsing their shelves - they both knew of my obsession with Trek, and they were very kind to listen to my rambling about this story I wanted to write. Finally one day the clerk said, "I want you to go home and write the first paragraph, and then come back here and show it to me." I think she got sick of me talking and talking and never doing! So I did - I went home and scratched out the first sentence: "Annie McGregor could have sworn she'd seen the young man someplace before." Yup, you guessed it - my first fanfic ever was my own Trek fic, Through a Glass Darkly! I managed to write that first paragraph out, and I took it back to that clerk, who gave me some point of view pointers and encouraged me to continue. So continue I did, teaching myself to write fiction as I went - over about five years or so until I finally feel like it's done now. And now I'm continuing with a sequel, Face to Face, but that's another story.
That same year I remember hearing about this new show, Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman. I thought, "Well, that sounds interesting. I think I'll check it out." The first part of the first season I switched the channel back and forth between LnC and Seaquest DSV, which also premiered that year in the same time slot, so I missed parts of various LnC eps - but I caught them again in reruns, and taped them when I started taping the show several years later. About halfway through the first season I realized that I was well and truly hooked on LnC, and stopped watching Seaquest because it conflicted. (I suppose if I ever get into DVDs I'll get Seaquest, because I did enjoy it - but I liked LnC better...) Then I got a position teaching English in Africa at my mom's friend's ESL institute for about six months of 1996, and my flight left just before the wedding episode aired - I was so mad, because I had been looking forward to it for months... But of course, it turned out to be the beginning of the Argh - I came back to Canada just in time for the beginning of fourth season, and I couldn't figure out why they weren't married. And of course, that was the middle of the NK arc, so no wonder I was confused. And then they started missing shows and repeating old shows, and then they just stopped showing it, and I couldn't figure out why; I didn't have access to the net then, so I never heard about the show being cancelled - I think it took me about a year before I realized that it wasn't just that my station had dumped the show.
In 1997 I got a job teaching at a school in central British Columbia that had internet access in the seventh grade homeroom, and I got permission from the seventh grade homeroom teacher to use it after school - later they set up an internet/computer lab over in the high school building, so sometimes I would go over there after school, too. (But it was a Mac lab, and I was/am more comfortable with PCs.) At first I just did general surfing, but I quickly stumbled on TV show sites, including fanfic sites. I had watched the odd MASH ep at other people's homes and on my own TV, although at that time I really didn't consider myself a diehard fan. And I have always been fascinated by time travel - eps that deal with it are some of my favourites in Trek and other shows - so when I saw the Quantum Leap novels in the library, I got hooked on that show, too. (Never saw an actual ep, tho, until our Canadian station Space: the Imagination Station started airing it a few years back.) So the first online fanfic that I can remember reading was a MASH/Quantum Leap cross called (of course) Q*U*A*N*T*U*M L*E*A*P - I was a little lost about some of the QL mythology, but I enjoyed it. The second and third online fanfics that I can remember reading were a TNG/QL cross pair called (of course) L*E*A*P T*R*E*K I and II.
About this time I found the old Loiscla (was that it?) listserv on Indiana.edu, which later became the Yahoogroups LnC Fanfic list. I was *so* excited to find out that I wasn't the only LnC fan out there - I had thought that I was the only one on Earth, for some reason
- that I followed the link from the very next popup ad for free email service I saw (usa.com) and got my very first email address, and signed up for it. I honestly don't remember which was the first LnC fic I read there - I suspect it may have been something from Zoomway - but I do remember Irene's Firestorm and sequels were posted about that time, as well as some of Yvonne Connell's stories, and I was really impressed. (I also got into the XFiles this same year, and spent hours reading their stories - one of my favourite writers from that fandom, Sheryl Martin-Nantus, is also a prolific writer in my most newly discovered fandom, Stargate SG1, I was happy to find out recently... Her XF fics the Downtime Series and the Dragon Chronicles were some of the first I ever read in that genre.)
In 1998 I moved to Vancouver, and had to haunt the library, the employment agencies, and a multitude of internet cafes in order to keep up with my fandoms - at that time, just LnC and XF and Trek, although I soon added others. A new author had just started posting to the fic list and the boards, and had been nominated for the first Kerth awards I ever attended, and I was really impressed with her work. When I went to Anne Ciotola's IRC tutorial, there she was, and I was totally overwhelmed - my favourite new author, there in the same channel as me, and I could chat with her in person! Well, Wendy Richards won that New Author award, and I was just tickled for her (you remmeber that, don't you, Wendy?
) - and when later on we found ourselves on IRC again, I started asking her all sorts of questions about writing. It was she who suggested the topic for my first LnC fic, Moments of Illumination, btw. I wrote a couple others, and joined the round robin team for a while, and I still have one fic in the works that I've been stuck on for several years - and I have a series that I'm trying to plan, but now I'm in Korea without my tapes, so that has to stay on hold for a while. But I still have to thank Wendy for getting me writing again...
So, well, I guess that answers your question a LOT more than you ever thought you wanted to know about me, right? But you asked, so I babbled
I'll shut up now...
Melisma (retreating back under her Rock to gargle with salt-water after all of that!)
