Fandom Questions Meme (21)
13 Mar 2018 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisbluespirit21. What was the first fanfic you ever wrote?
A good question, because I'm not entirely sure. I think it probably must be the long Six, Peri and Mary Sue fic, but I can't swear to it that I didn't actually post something else first. It is still up on the net, via the Internet Archive and alt.drwho.creative, because I started in newsgroup days and alt.drwho.creative stuff dies only slowly and you can't take it down, but it's pretty bad and under my real name, so I'm not providing a link.
I poked alt.drwho.creative to check, and it's a bit hard to be certain - it seems a bit of an odd way to start fic-writing - but it looks as if that might not have been the first thing:
I had this cunning idea that I could begin a story and other people could continue it and so on. (A round robin, but I'd never heard of a round robin until after I posted it.) The thing is, newsnet groups weren't like the modern internet and messages appeared at different times to different people, and sometimes not at all to other people, so the continuation got rather sprawling, but it was entertaining as it imploded down different trouser legs of a newsnet octopus, anyway.
After that, Becky Dowgiert started the first moderated Round Robin of what became the Internet Adventures, so sometimes as a result, I like to claim that I started the whole thing. (It's important to note that nobody else ever agreed with my claim, and these days barely anybody even remembers the Internet Adventures, but, hey, they were good days. Most of the time.)
A good question, because I'm not entirely sure. I think it probably must be the long Six, Peri and Mary Sue fic, but I can't swear to it that I didn't actually post something else first. It is still up on the net, via the Internet Archive and alt.drwho.creative, because I started in newsgroup days and alt.drwho.creative stuff dies only slowly and you can't take it down, but it's pretty bad and under my real name, so I'm not providing a link.
I poked alt.drwho.creative to check, and it's a bit hard to be certain - it seems a bit of an odd way to start fic-writing - but it looks as if that might not have been the first thing:
I had this cunning idea that I could begin a story and other people could continue it and so on. (A round robin, but I'd never heard of a round robin until after I posted it.) The thing is, newsnet groups weren't like the modern internet and messages appeared at different times to different people, and sometimes not at all to other people, so the continuation got rather sprawling, but it was entertaining as it imploded down different trouser legs of a newsnet octopus, anyway.
After that, Becky Dowgiert started the first moderated Round Robin of what became the Internet Adventures, so sometimes as a result, I like to claim that I started the whole thing. (It's important to note that nobody else ever agreed with my claim, and these days barely anybody even remembers the Internet Adventures, but, hey, they were good days. Most of the time.)
no subject
Date: 13 Mar 2018 07:35 pm (UTC)XD
I'd take Usenet over Facebook any day.
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Date: 13 Mar 2018 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 13 Mar 2018 09:45 pm (UTC)I've been on the Net since 1994, and it's true that in the early days there could be problems with newsgroup messages not propagating in a timely fashion. But that was pretty much sorted by the late 1990s as Net connectivity improved, and that was several years before Web forums came to dominate.
I still follow a few newsgroups that remain active. It's convenient to be able to download messages for all the groups that I'm interested in in one go, whereas I have to visit individually each Web forum that I follow.