in case anyone's curious
Jun. 18th, 2004 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lierdumoaI wrote this as a reply to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
permetaform's post, and thought I should share it with everyone.
How Fandom Ate My Life: A short autobiographical sketch.
I'll start at the beginning, with my discovery of trashy romance novels. They had sex in them, more graphic than I had ever seen before. All those horribly cliche sayings weren't cliche yet. I could appreciate the visuals without falling off my chair laughing at the utterly ridiculous language. I think I was eleven at the time.
Later on I realized that I kind of liked the idea of m/m sex, but as far as I could tell no one was writing it. Then I discovered in The Years Best Fantasy and Horror in Barnes & Noble. We'll say I was thirteen or fourteen. I found, to my surprise, that one of the two stories in the yearly anthology actually had m/m sex of some sort in it! I got a bit into vampires, because of the horror fiction I was reading, but unfortunately the books didn't have any gay male vampire sex in them. Oh, well.
Then somewhere halfway through my junior year in high school (I was sixteen at this point) a few of my friends turned me on to BtVS. I instantly became obsessed (after quickly developing my first tv falldown crush on Spike), and went to the internet searching for episode transcripts, since I had come so late to the show.
Inadvertently, I came uponcousinjean's Dancing Lessons series (it's cowritten with a number of people). Since Buffy kept treating Spike like shit on the show, I was finally getting a proper Buffy/Spike shmoop fix. Also? Great plot, great characterization, and sex was decent.
Delving deeper, I soon found more B/S. Eventually I found a few authors who wrote not only B/S, but also Xander/Spike. Now B/S was still my favorite pairing, and I kind of hated Xander a little on the show, but here I'd finally found my gay vampire sex, so I wasn't about to complain.
I went through more pairings, then multifandom authors led to multiple fandoms. When I found HP on ff.net (before they put up the NC-17 ban and it all went to shit), I didn't even bother to look for het fic, initally. None of the het pairings particularly appealed to me. I started with Harry/Draco, moved on to Snapeslash, and eventually (for reasons beyond my ken) chose Snape/Sirius as my OTP. I'll still read pretty much any slash in the fandom, though (with the exception of Sirius/Remus). HP got me addicted to a number of yahoo!groups. It got me to start writing slash (I'd written some badfic B/S het before) and find myself a beta. I'm still friends withdaylight_shadow after knowing her a little over two years. She's more into AtS than QaF, but we occasionally dabble in each other's interests.
Only a month or so after discovering online fandom, SV started up. I watched the pilot, instantly became addicted, and came to the conclusion that it was the gayest show *ever.* I was so into the fandom that even though I haven't read the fic regularly for months I can still identify at least 80% of the stories asked for on the storyfinders yahoo! group. Thanks to the large number of good writers on SSA, I have far higher standards for my writing than I did previously.
I managed to keep reading SV fic regularly whilst reading and writing HP. After a while I discovered livejournal, and kind of left the world of yahoo!groups behind. Then came Everwood slash, where I dabbled in fic, produced a lifetime supply of animated icons, and met a few really great people (I had turned eighteen by this time, by the way). Then Queer as Folk kind of ate my life. First came mad feedback, then pimpage, then more mad feedback, then the amazing exploding friends list. The rest is history.
ETA: Oh yeah. And also there's that whole part where I met Syd, we married, got separated, and had two beautiful, fucked up, genderless kids.
permetaform's post, and thought I should share it with everyone.How Fandom Ate My Life: A short autobiographical sketch.
I'll start at the beginning, with my discovery of trashy romance novels. They had sex in them, more graphic than I had ever seen before. All those horribly cliche sayings weren't cliche yet. I could appreciate the visuals without falling off my chair laughing at the utterly ridiculous language. I think I was eleven at the time.
Later on I realized that I kind of liked the idea of m/m sex, but as far as I could tell no one was writing it. Then I discovered in The Years Best Fantasy and Horror in Barnes & Noble. We'll say I was thirteen or fourteen. I found, to my surprise, that one of the two stories in the yearly anthology actually had m/m sex of some sort in it! I got a bit into vampires, because of the horror fiction I was reading, but unfortunately the books didn't have any gay male vampire sex in them. Oh, well.
Then somewhere halfway through my junior year in high school (I was sixteen at this point) a few of my friends turned me on to BtVS. I instantly became obsessed (after quickly developing my first tv falldown crush on Spike), and went to the internet searching for episode transcripts, since I had come so late to the show.
Inadvertently, I came upon
cousinjean's Dancing Lessons series (it's cowritten with a number of people). Since Buffy kept treating Spike like shit on the show, I was finally getting a proper Buffy/Spike shmoop fix. Also? Great plot, great characterization, and sex was decent.Delving deeper, I soon found more B/S. Eventually I found a few authors who wrote not only B/S, but also Xander/Spike. Now B/S was still my favorite pairing, and I kind of hated Xander a little on the show, but here I'd finally found my gay vampire sex, so I wasn't about to complain.
I went through more pairings, then multifandom authors led to multiple fandoms. When I found HP on ff.net (before they put up the NC-17 ban and it all went to shit), I didn't even bother to look for het fic, initally. None of the het pairings particularly appealed to me. I started with Harry/Draco, moved on to Snapeslash, and eventually (for reasons beyond my ken) chose Snape/Sirius as my OTP. I'll still read pretty much any slash in the fandom, though (with the exception of Sirius/Remus). HP got me addicted to a number of yahoo!groups. It got me to start writing slash (I'd written some badfic B/S het before) and find myself a beta. I'm still friends with
daylight_shadow after knowing her a little over two years. She's more into AtS than QaF, but we occasionally dabble in each other's interests.Only a month or so after discovering online fandom, SV started up. I watched the pilot, instantly became addicted, and came to the conclusion that it was the gayest show *ever.* I was so into the fandom that even though I haven't read the fic regularly for months I can still identify at least 80% of the stories asked for on the storyfinders yahoo! group. Thanks to the large number of good writers on SSA, I have far higher standards for my writing than I did previously.
I managed to keep reading SV fic regularly whilst reading and writing HP. After a while I discovered livejournal, and kind of left the world of yahoo!groups behind. Then came Everwood slash, where I dabbled in fic, produced a lifetime supply of animated icons, and met a few really great people (I had turned eighteen by this time, by the way). Then Queer as Folk kind of ate my life. First came mad feedback, then pimpage, then more mad feedback, then the amazing exploding friends list. The rest is history.
ETA: Oh yeah. And also there's that whole part where I met Syd, we married, got separated, and had two beautiful, fucked up, genderless kids.
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Date: 2004-06-18 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-18 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-18 11:30 pm (UTC)*bookmarks*
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Date: 2004-06-18 11:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-18 11:34 pm (UTC)So many fandoms, so little time...
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Date: 2004-06-18 11:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 12:13 am (UTC)get on AIM pwease?
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Date: 2004-06-19 12:13 am (UTC):(
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Date: 2004-06-19 12:33 am (UTC)I'm the perfect watchdog, I never sleep.
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Date: 2004-06-19 01:18 am (UTC)I still have to watch S4 of QaF... *head down in shame*
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Date: 2004-06-19 01:59 am (UTC)