pittwitch

I am thoroughly enjoying all the stories!

I am thoroughly enjoying all the stories!

Joined FF.net in April of 2003, during their purge, so while I dabbled on “dirty” versions to my story, I focused on the more “clean” ones (not that those are particularly clean, just figured it’s low enough not to be a concern there).   When I went to post my originals, I studied the ToS for the original side of FF.net, and realized that wasn’t going to work, found AFF.net and joined four years ago here.  As I’ve recently started to rework the second fanfic (sequel to my first), I’ve had an urge to post the “smut” version; I’m still trying to work out the best place for that.

I wrote some of my early fanfic attempts in pen pre-internet including a really terrible vampire story. No porn fics in them days for me! Don’t recall precisely now the first fanfic I read. Never looked at that sort of thing at school, but I first got on the internet at home in the late 90s. So, in terms of internet fanfic from others, I would have first read it either on a geocities fansite or one of the alt.fan newsgroups for me. I seem to recall alt.fan.pratchett was specifically against fan fiction being posted there, but not all of them were like that. Though many newsgroups were basically dying by that point it didn’t take long to find newsgroups with more dedicated FF content either. I had my own geocities fansite for a while with ther standard web ring links and and hit counters. They didn’t have a lot of space and the amount of page impressions allowed in an hour was tiny, but still good times… There was a long gone site called something like trekslash.ca which I am pretty sure was where I read a lot of really good Janeway/Torres femslash. One author was amazing and I can’t even recall their name. 
I found the early version of the Grey Archive in about 2000 and it was on there I first heard of AFF being set up a couple years later. If I am remembering right this was after the FF.net first big mature content purge. I lurked/anonymously reviewed on AFF and didn’t join with my original account here ‘til 2004.
Weird to think how much time has passed tbh.

I was a kid. It was like 1997 or 1998 and I was kinda exploring the internet for the first time. Found some websites for my favourite (at the time) TV show, Breaker High (A canadian high school drama) and lo and behold, one of the sites had fics on it! I didn’t know wtf fan fiction was, so I read those fics thinking they were like transcripts of episodes. I thought I had watched every episode there was so I was super excited that they didn’t sound familiar. 
And then they got dirty. That’s when I kinda realized that these ‘episodes’ did not uphold the Canadian Broadcast Co. standards. Then I realized if other people could write that shit, so the hell could I! With my newfound godly powers, I impregnated the whole cast of characters, because… well, because I could. 
Yup. 

In a burst of nostalgia, I tried to find my way back to the first ever “net” fanfiction I read.  I chanced upon it after my little ones were asleep and I couldn’t  manage that feat as well.  A google search on Severus Snape led me to SnapeCast which then had featured fictions.  This was LONG before all the books were out.  The one that trapped me involved a piano playing Snape who actually managed to lead the children to safety in the fiction’s version of the final battle.  I can’t remember the title.  I can’t find it again.  But I began to wonder about my fellow AFF members.  How did you fall down the rabbit hole?

I’ve been thinking about this most of the afternoon, and it happened in 2008, probably somewhere in February or March most likely. If memory serves I discovered anime that spring, more precisely Death Note, and a little while later Bleach. And googling the interwebs to find out the name of the intro-song in Death Note, I somehow stumbled upon fan fiction. Surprisingly enough, the Pit instantly felt all kinds of wrong, so I never ventured there. Somewhere in these aimless wanderings of the dark alleys of the World Wide Web, I stumbled across of all things, a Supernatural fan fiction, and since that was another silly thing I liked, I followed that rabbit and found AFF. 
I honestly can’t remember exactly how it happened, but I do remember that it had something to do with Supernatural, Death Note, and Bleach, and then in the process I not only discovered AFF but also my favourite band, Nightmare.  

I knew someone a long time ago who wrote Buffy fan fiction, and while the idea sounded intriguing, it wasn’t a fandom I was drawn to. My elderspawn was still small, and my Internet time was spend hosting chats for an AOL seed venue called Moms Online. The fanfic writer was a fellow chat host, and I think if the site where she published had been more than just Buffy fiction, I might have wandered over.
So, many years later, while irritated by what was really a huge amount of laziness on the part of the writers of the CRPG Neverwinter Nights 2, I went prowling through the Bioware community forums, and chanced upon a thread with the title, “The Shirtless Saga.” It seems I wasn’t the only one peeved by plot holes and lousy character development and apparently people wrote fan fiction to address these deficiencies. The spawn were old enough not to need my every waking moment, and so, one afternoon at the pool, I pulled out a notebook and wrote my first fan fiction, which I posted on FFN before I could talk myself out of it.
And once I’d taken that plunge, while reading an amazing fan fiction by another author, I discovered he had posted a far less decorous version here. And there were more stories, and more fandoms like LotR, and… well, apparently AFF is sort of stuck with me. 

I had an idea for a fanfic and I thought, “But what would I even do with it if I wrote it?” An internet search brought me to FFN, where I saw just how vast and diverse the fanfic world is. 

First time I came across fanfiction, I thought I had downloaded a stolen copy of JKR’s fifth book, so I deleted it.  Didn’t realize until sometime later that it was fanfiction, not her book.  Once I realized, I began to read, got hooked.  I found a fanfic story that I liked, and while waiting for the author to post, started to drum a list of possible plot ideas to send to them … before I knew it, I decided to sketch it out, and I had my own story, though taking a minor character of hers and changing it into a major character.   After I that story, I began a sequel.   With how these stories started, I can’t bring them here

It’s been ages, but I believe that the first time I came across fanfictions was all the way back to the Geocities days. Back then fansites were a big thing, and they sprang around like we’ve got wiki pages these days. And while most of them offered some basic information of certain series, along with the occasional image, there were a few that had fan made stories set in the same fandom.
I must admit that this caught my attention, and a quick search later led me to some of the biggest fanfiction archives at the time. Some of them are still around today, but the majority of the smaller ones are all but abandoned.

In a burst of nostalgia, I tried to find my way back to the first ever “net” fanfiction I read.  I chanced upon it after my little ones were asleep and I couldn’t  manage that feat as well.  A google search on Severus Snape led me to SnapeCast which then had featured fictions.  This was LONG before all the books were out.  The one that trapped me involved a piano playing Snape who actually managed to lead the children to safety in the fiction’s version of the final battle.  I can’t remember the title.  I can’t find it again.  But I began to wonder about my fellow AFF members.  How did you fall down the rabbit hole?

I always let the IRL Scary know when someone is looking for Nomads, or other stories, just as a bit of a “Hey, you know this is good when,”  pat on the back with the hope that maybe, just maybe someday, Scary will write again. 
 

I always let the IRL Scary know when someone is looking for Nomads, or other stories, just as a bit of a “Hey, you know this is good when,”  pat on the back with the hope that maybe, just maybe someday, Scary will write again. 
 

I always let the IRL Scary know when someone is looking for Nomads, or other stories, just as a bit of a “Hey, you know this is good when,”  pat on the back with the hope that maybe, just maybe someday, Scary will write again. 
 

Scary/Willow pulled her work from the internet.  It’s not up anymore.  Nomads of Trilos was such a good story too.  Maybe someday ...

Now how can I say no to my favorite Witch?

No, now, you have to park your ass in a chair and write the 3rd book!  Pretty please?

From a personal standpoint, I’d love to have an update feature that sends me an email. But from the other side of the issue, I also know it’s not as easy to code in features as people think because we’re working with what’s become a custom piece of coding in the archive. We can’t simply add in features we like, as we can do in the forum, because there’s no library of features for us to browse. Our coder has to write something that will work with the rest of the code seamlessly, and that’s not always possible.
In a perfect world, i.e., one in which I win a huge lottery, I’d give AFF the money to purchase a brand new, super powerful package for the archive, and hire lots of minions to carefully migrate the databases to the new package. The reality is that we’re all volunteers running this place on a shoestring budget which barely covers the cost of hosting the archive. There isn’t anything left for buying software. We do amazingly well with what we have, though, I think.

I’ll chime in.  Thank you mods, like @BronxWench, etc, for keeping this site running.  AFF is the only website I’ve actually hit that donate button on, and not regretting it (so far).

I'm dying laughing ... thankfully Mr. is talented with vehicles, but we have walked this road in other "manly man" aspects of life!

I am very, very excited about the upcoming republication of Ghost’s Sight, the first book in the Witch’s Apprentice series. NineStar Press has been good enough to give me a new home, and I couldn’t be happier.
The book is now available for pre-order at the NineStar website, and I’ll add links for third party sites as soon as the book is released. There’s some new material, and a fabulous new cover, so take a peek!