It's been really interesting reading all of these delurking stories.
It took me quite a while to delurk, and then I did it in stages. Although I found elements of the online fandom in the summer of 1995, I didn't participate in any group activities at that stage: I joined the old LOISCLA list, but saw far too many spoilers for Season 3 eps which I hadn't seen yet, so quit again in the same afternoon. However, I did find fanfic, and began devouring avidly!
And then at some point, a year or two later, I rejoined LOISCLA and then the fic list, jumping into some very enjoyable discussions there - I remember one about when Lois fell in love with Clark, as opposed to Superman, in which Kathy and Zoomway were disagreeing animatedly with each other.
Fanfic writing came a little later, in early 1998, I think, when it occurred to me that I'd always loved writing and that I should give it a try. This, of course, was in pre-MB days, and so my stories went straight to the Archive. I couldn't believe it, the morning after the first one went up, when my work inbox had about half a dozen feedback emails!
IRC came later still, and that was because, much to my shock and disbelief, I had been nominated for Kerths.
