#everyone from the atl-sen mailing list back in the day

[lauramkaye]

The Milestones You Didn’t See Coming

So someone commented a really early story of mine today and it made me go back to try to find when I posted it. Thanks to the fact that my first posts were to alt.tv.xfiles.creative and were automatically archived by Gossamer, I was able to pin down the date of the first fic I ever posted.

Wednesday, December 8, 1999.

I have been writing and posting fanfic for more than more than 20 years. My first story is as old now as I was when I wrote it.

In my time in fandom I’ve hopped around, from X-Files to Sentinel to Due South to pop slash to MCU with so many shorter stops along the way and so many other fandoms I loved even when I didn’t write for them. I was accidentally a BNF for about five minutes, mostly because my fic was hosted on the same website as a couple of actual, much more important BNFs. I wrote stories I posted, started stories I never posted, and in one instance started posting a WIP that I eventually took down because I knew I was never going to finish it and I felt bad about leaving it incomplete to taunt people. (If you ever see this, Pat, I’m really sorry I never finished it. I know you liked it and your encouragement and enthusiasm for the project meant so much to me.)  

I made friends. So many dear, dear friends that I treasure to this day, even the ones that I’ve fallen out of touch with over the years. When I got married, one of my bridesmaids was my sister, one was my best friend since infancy, and the other two I met through fandom. Almost all of the close friends that I made in adulthood, I first met through fandom, including the one who introduced me to my spouse.

I was not prolific for all of those years, but even when I went for a while without writing anything new, I was still reading fic and engaging in fannish circles to some degree. In those years, I finally fulfilled a lifelong dream and wrote a novel. When I started, my output was purely fluffy romantic G-rated slice-of-life stories of the type that in the XF fandom of the 90s we called "Vignettes." I loved (and still love) long, meaty, plotty novel-length stories that would last me a long time, and I wanted to write that way, but never thought I could. But time and amazing mentoring from more established fans (shoutouts especially to @cesperanza, the writer that baby writer me wanted to be when I grew up, who was largely responsible for teaching me how to actually edit in a beta and not just proofread) and amazing writing and editing partners have helped me to not only become more prolific but to keep growing as a writer. Writing fanfic is a source of deep creative joy for me, and engaging with slash fandom was one way that I, who grew up in a deeply conservative religious southern family and didn’t even meet an out gay person until college, started the journey to realizing that I was myself bi and not straight like I’d always assumed. (Let me tell you, THAT realization made so much of my life make so much more sense in hindsight.)

Basically what I’m saying is that fanfic has made my life richer in so many ways, and I want to encourage anyone who might be worried that maybe their work isn’t good enough, or that nobody else will like what they like, or that maybe they should have outgrown their hobby by now, or that they’re wasting their time and should be writing “real” (ie, sold for money) stories: hang in there. Things that give you joy don’t have to make money to be valid uses of your time. You aren’t too old to still be reading and writing fanfic.

Here’s the the next 20 years.