Fanfic Beginnings
By Icy Brian
This feature was inspired by a thread DK started in the Web Forum. The thread, and this feature, focuses on fanfic authors' first completed fanfic, why/if it sucked, if it reflected their later work, what got them started in fanfic, who influenced them, and if they ever want to become a professional. What do some of the authors have to say? Take a look!
Note: This feature will probably be updated on a fairly consistent basis, as I will be adding more authors to it as time goes on.
Alex Weitzman
I got introduced to the concept of taking previously established works and
writing new stuff out of that on Prodigy, at my grandfather's house. I ran
across the Prodigy Sonic the Hedgehog message boards, where they had created
a whole world of new characters that interacted with Sonic, Sally, and company.
Suffice to say, I was hooked, and getting AOL allowed me to try and make
my own Sonic fanfic group. I eventually just joined an already-existing one,
and wrote my first (Sonic-based) fanfic, "Double Crossed". As Homer Simpson
might say, "suckiest piece of suck that ever did suck". Script form, WEAK
plot of Knuckles betraying the FF for his parents....you get the idea.
Still, you've gotta start somewhere. It took me three years or so before even venturing out of Sonic, crossing into Final Fantasy lines. Latching onto VII and loving the Spirit Energy concept, I started wondering what it would be like if some characters resurrected and had to avoid the same chaotic fate of FFVII - my own take on the oft-discussed ending. This was "Cid Gainsborough". Granted, the idea went through several different ideas, but two images stuck: Cid using an old Fire materia, and Cid killing himself in the end. Actually, I first figured Cid as the reincarnation of Sephiroth, killing himself to prevent himself from going down that path. Instead, I went with something more epic than dark, and it was well-received. I had gotten much better than "Double Crossed" standards, but I can still look at "Cid Gainsborough" and think to myself what I could've added in the form of narrative.
My experience with "Cid Gainsborough" set the stage for other stories I would write; I would start to notice any unanswered questions in a game and think, "Could I write a story out of that?" So now I write Squaresoft fics and Sonic fics side-by-side, and I've taken inspiration from both. To date, my favorite fanfic author is actually a Sonic writer by the name of Dan Drazen, who has written some of the best fics I've ever seen.
As it stands, I love writing, and I've learned that I need to do it as much as I need to do my other passion, acting. Someday, I definitely would like to make a career out of writing, though I'm thinking more in the Hollywood realm, as I'd like to act and write at the same time. How appropriate that now I need to get out of narrative and back to script form for the future. I don't think I'll be stopping my fanfic efforts anytime soon, though, even if I make it in Tinseltown. One must stick by one's passion, you know.
Black
My first fanfic was written in between fifth and sixth grade. This was before
I had the internet. Hell, this was before I had a computer.
I was really into G.I. Joe at the time (and still am), and thus I began writing G.I. Joe fanfiction. My friend Jibin and I both did. .... The stories, sadly, were written in screenplay format. But even at the tender age of eleven, I still implemented the screenplay format better than seventeen year old authors at ff.net. See, after we'd write up the fanfics, we'd actually act them out with our G.I. Joe figures. Oh man, that was sweet. We even acted out G.I. Joe: The Movie. We also created RPGs. We'd create characters, weapons, towns, etc.. and we'd even write down the scripts. Then, sadly, Jibin moved. We still get together some weekends to play basketball. We've both grown up, though, and no longer write G.I. Joe fanfics. His figures are still in tact, though. Mine, however, were lost in the great fire of '00. Not only could I have gotten serious money for them on ebay, but.. they bore a lot of sentimental value. And they're irreplaceable. ... Wasn't I supposed to be talking about fanfic?
Cadet McNally
I suppose the full story must be told. Granted I'm nowhere near as well known
an author as Sam or Icy or Minmei or ZP or Nanaki or Gaspar... you get the
idea. But I too have written works of crap on Icy's page.
It all began in August of 1998....
I had gotten Chrono Trigger for my birthday... probably the year before. Searching the internet for things that I may have missed, I came upon a website called "Icy Brian's Chrono Trigger Page". Not finding anything I could use, I decided to move around and see what else the page offered. There was a section devoted to "fanfic". Now, at this point in history, I was still a bit of a novice to the internet. Sure, I was a veteran of chat rooms and bulletin boards, but not the internet. So this was the first time I'd ever heard of fanfic.
I did some reading, and, despite what Sam would say, I thought her work was pretty good. Then an idea sparked in my head. I thought, "Hey, maybe I can write, too!" Yes folk, I saw a soon-to-be overcrowded genre and thought, "me too!" I churned out a story that, while the idea was good, the writer turned it into a piece of crap whose title contained a typo that went unnoticed for about two years (Officially it's called "Live After Lavos" while I had intended "Life After Lavos". Oops.). I mean, at the time, there were few stories dealing with the group immediately after the destruction of Lavos, and I figured I'd help fill the gap, and start a big long series. I'd have fared better if I were a decent writer.
With the story complete, I needed a name. My orignal pen name was "FanFicScribbler", which was fitting, though I didn't know it at the time. Later I tried something off-the-wall, entitled "Crono Goes to College". Boy it sucked. After writing a chapter with no plot, I introduced a really STUPID villain with STUPIDER cohorts with a screwed up plan. Then I ripped off Tom Clancy and ended it. Three chapters total. My God it sucked.
I then strayed from writing for a while. I figured I'd do a MST (though I started out spelling it MiST, as I'd seen others do) of a GOOD story, figured it'd keep me busy for awhile. A couple years is awhile, and I'm not done yet. Still riffing away at chapters 14, 15, and 16 of Sam's Next Generation. I'd like to thank Sam for her permission (again), sorry you don't like it, though.
But the first chapter of that had to get approved, as Icy had a new policy. It did, amazingly enough. With the posting came a name change, as I was gaining notoriety as "Cadet_McNally". Who the hell is "FanFicScribbler"??
I won't say anything about the fic that got rejected, though. Boy, that was embarassing now that I look back.
Chessidy
Am I? Yes. Blame it on my own superior lack of sense. And stuff.
La la la, don't mind me, I'm silly.
I guess the first fanfic I wrote was in sixth grade or so, on this dinky little Apple II we had crammed in our basement. I'd read a book by Christopher Pike (yes, yes, I know -- it was SIXTH GRADE) called Whisper of Death, and I was none too happy with its ending. (Although, you know, really? There are NO Christopher Pike books that have nice endings. What the hell is that? Uh, not that I still read them or anything like that. Never. *whistles*) Anyway, I have this bad habit of re-writing things in my head if I don't like the way they go. And this was perfectly fine until Whisper of Death, 'cause it bothered me so much that writing it out in my head wasn't good enough; I had to type it out. So I wrote it a new ending. And then in 9th grade, I wrote an X-Files script, just for kicks, and turned it in as my A extension in my Language Arts 9 class. (My teacher was really neat -- he let you turn in just about anything as an A extension, and as long as he liked it, you were good to go.) But I hadn't heard of it called fanfic until... guess whose page.
Yup, Icy Brian's -- which was actually one of the first webpages I stumbled onto when I first got Ze 'Net. (Oddly enough, through typing in an FFT quote in a search engine.) And I found fanfic - thought, hey, fun! Tried it out. In a horrible little piece of drivel called the Midgar Ruins, which is frighteningly enough up on Icy's page still. When really, it should be burned. Well, deleted, since burning something online might be... difficult. And anyway, then I realized that sucked, and started writing other fics, and now that's all I seem to do -- write sucky fics, I mean. Huzzah!
Yes, I realize no one cares. Going now. I have some kitties to annoy.
DK
I was first exposed to fanfic only a few years ago, appropriately enough,
on Icy's page. I had always loved to write and had always loved RPGs, but
the idea that these two could be brought together and that there was an audience
to read such works was something entirely new to me. In fact, if I hadn't
blundered into Icy's site while fooling around on the Internet on my mom's
computer at work, I probably never would have discovered fanfiction, period.
I still remember the very first fanfic I ever read. It was "The Red Fist" by Frank Verderosa, and I was blown away by the story elements. The Turks joining forces with the heroes? Aeris returned to life? For one of the few times in recent memory, I was astonished at the opportunities and possibilities for fiction that lay before me.
Soon, I branched out and read other works by other good authors on Icy's site. I truly don't remember now what order I read those fics in, but I know I enjoyed and was inspired by them.
So, immediately after this discovery, I dove into writing FF7 fiction and produced a couple of sub-par entries which even in my ineptitude I realized weren't that great. One, I believe, was a short piece about the heroes failing, committing suicide, and dying as Meteor hit the planet. I think the other was some sort of continuation fic that teamed up Yuffie and the Turks. Both were rather bad (but I kept them on my hard drive for old time's sake). Still, eventually I managed to write something that was at least okay (Blood and Fire), and I plodded along from there.
Since then, I've written quite a few stories, usually dark, as I credit authors like Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, and Ray Bradbury with influencing my style. I hope I've improved somewhat over the years, but regardless, I still have just as much fun writing now as I did then.
Flux
Long long ago, in a galaxy far away...
MY FANFICTION *star wars theme*
I started years ago under the wing of the writer's conclave... A secret organization of people dedicated to writing better than others. I, being the only male child in the apprenticeship, was subject to higher standards than the others. My work was graded fiercely, and I was left unto myself for days at a time in order to compose things that were of the calibur that the conclave might pay it attention. But alas, I was a miserable writer. I had apprenticed at twelve years of age, and I had yet to become the best writer ever. My poor works would earn me whippings on some days, and beatings on others. It was at this time when my personality split into two halves, and I went insane.
I was imprisoned in the basement of the conclave's building for my inability to catch on with the others... They turned my existence below them, into a nightmarish tale that was told to the newer apprentices after me. My hunger for brains increased exponentially whilst I sat in my cell.
Until I escaped...
I killed everyone in the conclave with my bare hands. Women and men alike... But I had no control over my actions... I killed them all without care, or notion to the fact that they were struggling like I was, to be the best. I killed them, because my mind told me I had to.
I woke up in a pool of blood, three days later... My sanity somehow restored. I was so startled by what I had done, that I tried to kill myself in revenge for my unintentional actions...
But an angel appeared before me...
"Go and write." It said to me.
So I left the conclave to rot, and went on my way to tour the world and sharpen my skills.
I, however did not spill my works out without study, and I learned that those
who are deemed to be 'good', are still not the 'best'. And thus, I wrote
very little, and read a very lot. My travels were long and arduous. Seeing
things that interested me, and things that did not. (*COUGH CHRONO TRIGGER
FANFICS COUGH*) Until...
ATTACK!
I was attacked by a group of beautiful female-bandits, and me being the chivalrous master of the deadly arts, I could not fight back against their bossomous advances. I was captured, and taken to their encampment, where beautiful women repeatedly had sex with me. And in the fervor of vaginal ecstacy, I suddenly realized something...
I would soon reach my hopes and expectations in writing...
Soon in my journeys... I came to the town known as "IcyBrianVille" as a passerby. And I saw his fanfiction section...
"Damn you Brian" was all I cold say... It was abominable, never had I seen such a travesty since Yahoo.com. I swore that day that I would DESTROY his site.
But not by force... That would be too easy...
I would do it by my writing...
And now, here I am, writing stuff. Waiting for my opportunity to topple the regime, once and for all. And then return to GOD... whom I hope will forgive me for what I have done.
(J/K Brian... in case you couldn't tell.)
GrandLordMagus
Geez, flashback moment here. Well, I'd always wanted
to write stories that I thought up using other
people's established characters. OK, I lied; not
always. It was junior year when our English teacher
gave us this assignment: "Write a short story. On
anything." Can you see the revelation sparkling in my
eyes? It was just kinda like, "Whoa. What to do?" It
hit me: video games. Now in all technicality that
wasn't being terribly original, but novelty only had
to go so far for this project. So without a firm grasp
on RPG narrative yet and weaving my own stories from
them, I decided on a fanfic (at the time the word was
still unfamiliar to me) of Diablo, cos it had action
with a smattering of RPG elements that I loved so
dearly. And I wrote a rather simple story of the
game's first few minutes, only a page or two on Word,
and it was...simple. I didn't have a strong sense of
detail, or juxtaposed sentences, or any of that. But
the story evidently had the heart of a writer beating
deep inside it. So through a series of coincidences I
can hardly recall now, I ended up finding something
called fanfiction on this site, as I had come here in
its earlier days on simplenet. Why not try my hand at
it? It seemed sacrilegious to be making stories based
on someone else's work but that was only until I saw
that it was actually a rather widespread phenomenon.
So I wrote my Vincent fanfic and it was more or less
the vision I had of what a fanfic should be. And
obviously the Committee thought so too as it's now
posted on the site. After that came Pesmerga's story,
also posted in all its obscure glory in my own little
corner of this site....I got into this because I love
RPGs especially and I love to write. And to play
around with known characters makes for interesting
stories. I write fanfiction because it's fun. And I'll
bet that that's why most of, if not all, of us do so
too. It's an outlet for my creative energy. And
through it I get to interact with people who share
some of my interests and can appreciate a good
narrative, either in the game or spun-off from the
game.
Icy Brian
Yeah, I figured I'd throw my own little story in here. I was writing fanfiction
back before I knew there was a name for it. I think the first story I wrote
was a Mario story back when I was seven or eight. I probably wrote about
five of those, and even submitted one for some literary contest at my school
back in the day (I think it won something, but I can't remember what.) I
went looking for it today and found it buried in a stack of papers. Maybe
I'll type it up and post it in here; should be good for a laugh.
Anyways, time passed and I started up a web page. At first it was just basic information and the like; stuff you can find at a hundred other sites. Then someone by the name of Lucca (Camrock now) sent me his story entitled "Mystics." That story never gained a lot of recognition, but it did pave the way. After that one I received Robin Rice's "The Endless Search." That was the story that seemed to inspire people to send in their work. Shortly after her, I received stories from Nanaki and Krazy Sam. I still remember how disorganized the fanfic section was back then (in all honesty, I didn't have a clue how to run a page at the time; I was just winging it.) A little while later I decided to start writing again, and I started work on "A Shadow of Evil." I haven't written much lately. "Demon Gate" has been put on hold for the time being while I work on my second stage play (the first one was a success as a comedy, but I want to try my hand at action/drama this time around.)
Jakesnake
Well, I won't write anything abut how I found Icybrian. Let's just say that
reading fanfics vastly improved my english vocabulary, and simply got me
hooked. I sometimes considered writing one of my own (something about Magus'
legacy or something) but I never really wrote more than a page or so. Then,
I never really wrote anything until an assgnmet came up in school (I think
it was in the seventh grade), you were supposed to write a short story (ten
pages or so) and I asked her if it would be okay if I wrote a fanfic, she
said okay (after a little explaining) and so I did. That fic was apparently
good 'cause I got an A (well, the equivalent of an A) for it. And I have
gone through several attempts at translating it, but never really succeeded.
Even though translating is boring, I relly must start writing in Swedish
before I can do an English version. Why? Check out my FF7 fic on Icy's site.
That was my first and only attempt at writing directly in English. It wasn't
until afterwards that I realized the crappiness of it. But then again, my
good ones in Swedish never do get translated, since I always compare the
English version with the Swedish one, and the Swedish one is always so much
better. So I'd guess you'd say that my first one was "Firebird" (still under
it's working name as I never got the translation to turn out as i like it...
I really gotta copy it to my new computer... Damn, it's at my sister's place
now.). But my first one in English,and the first that I ever posted was "Duty".
Heh... my skill in naming my fics only slightly surpasses the namegiving
skills of Leonardo da Quirm.
Krazy Sam
Hehehehe. My first fanfic doesn't count. It was this Super Mario World fic that I did in fourth grade for an assignment. Blecch. And this kid named Luke Hoffman told me that I was breaking copyright laws and could be arrested or something like that. I got scared and threw away that story.
My first REAL fanfic was Losing You. And it wasn't too bad. For a first fanfic. There were its horrible parts, and there were its good parts. I just can't think of any. ^_^
But....hm. I dunno if it reflected my later works. Except the sap content. The sap content has remained fairly constant. Blecch again.
But I know what inspired me to write fics. (OH NO SHE'S TELLING IT AGAIN!) It was a warm night in... July or August? I don't remember. It was 1997, though. I found a brand spanking new Chrono Trigger Site on Yahoo. Heh. I must've been Yahoo's biggest CT searcher. I still remember how many links there were when I first started looking. (fourteen in the category, two not)
But anyway, back to the brand spanking new site. It was called "Icy Brian's Chrono Trigger Page". After laughing a bit at the thought of a Brian-sicle out there in someone's freezer (Eh heh... I really did.), I visited and looked at what he had to offer. Oh, back then, there wasn't much. Just the basic info that the other sites had. But there was a "Fanfic" section. I decided to look at it, and found a story by Lucca (Damn! That was MY alias! How could they?!) and a story by Robin Rice. Lucca's story was okay, but Robin Rice's was just awesome. This was before Search for Schala fics became cliché. And I read up to the fourth chapter, was very happy, sent Icy an e-mail saying that I was going to attempt a fanfic of my own... well, it was more like "I'm going 2 send a fanfic 2 u if u don't mind, k?", and he said "Cool! Can't wait to see it!" And then I sent him said fanfic. And he said "Cool! Can't wait to read it!" And then I said I was going to send him another fanfic. And he said "Cool! Can't wait to see it!"
XD Okay, maybe he didn't say that THAT many times. I have a distorted memory. ^_~
Heh. That was all I was going to write, but a bunch of people liked my fics and I got an inflated ego so I wrote a crapfic now known as "Finally Married". GAWD, it sucks. And people liked THAT, so I wrote "the Next Generation" But I came to my senses and quit while I was ahead.
Moo.
And now I'm a has-been. ^_^ But never ph33r, gentle readers, for I will attempt to write another stinker at some point.
Master Odin
I've wanted to write professionally for some time now, but I never really knew if I was any good. The only person I could get to read my work was my mom, and you know how moms tend to be a little partial. Then one day I stumbled into Icy's site while I was looking for some CT pics. After reading a few fanfics I thought to myself that I could write a fanfic and hopefully people will tell me whether I was really a good writer or not and let me know my weak points so I can work on them.
Mercutio
Hehehehe... I'm pretty sure my first fanfic ever was "Fall From Grace: the Story of Queen Zeal". And hoo boy, it was bad. I mean, the idea was good considering it came out of a disilusioned freshman's mind (but the only decently good parts came from a couple... erhm... unwilling influences *coughjermnanakisamzpminmerseponinecough*), but the way I told it was too fast and too crazy, with barely any dialogue and even less detail. So I rewrote the first chapter and added a couple more eventually (and in each on I neglected to follow the instructions from Icy regarding what to put in the subject of the message :P) until the idea eventually farted out completely on me. UGH and now I just had flashbacks of the freaky toddler dialects of Ceres (Zeal's new nickname), Masa, and Mune. Those dialects were like CC quality. Urgh. Oh well. The story is being kinda rewritten in a shorter version tentatively titled "Daughter of Sorrow", only it's about Schala instead and will hopefully make a wee bit more sense. Oh well. It's not like I'm ever really going to get around to writing it any time soon.
However, I don't think I should neglect my second fanfic "A Searching at an End". You see, I knew that Schala-searches were hideously cliché, but in this fic Schala was dead and he never found her, which made the idea really 1337 at the time. Even 1337er was the fact that I wrote in about two hours. After I sent it to Icy, STILL breaking the Subject rule, I received my first peice of fanmail ever.
"What's wrong with you? Magus isn't useless, he's even stronger than
Chrono!!!!
-Debbie"
Well, Debbie didn't have anything constructive to say, and the mail wasn't really fanmail, but it was the first indication that someone was actually reading my stories at all, so damn it, I loved Debbie. I wrote her back apologizing for my Magus-slander and asking her what she thought about my fic, but she never replied. I never got another fanmail for the story until JDHJANUS and The Storyteller both gave me loving praise. YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY. Then I eventually discovered FF.Net, and got a billion reviews at once for the fic.
Ehehe... on the topic of first fanmail, I'd might alwell bring up my first review. After I annoyed the reviewers for ages trying to get one of them to review me, I finally got one from Aeris, and she gave "Memories" an A- (Arg, I constantly misspelled Denadoro. I probably got it wrong just now too). I was so overjoyed once I saw it, that I instantly interrupted whatever she was doing and sent her a message that mainly consisted of SKJSDJA;;JASLKDHJSLDHLEHDJKL;. And then I mailed Ersatz Sobriquet hoping to get a loser review form him, and he replied telling me I was already a target, but he never reviewed me. My heart was as broken as it was after Debbie.
And as for what authors probably influence me the most, I'd have to say Robin Hobb because of her wonderful use of description that I always want to mimic but always fall short, Anne Rice for her awesome dialogue that I always want to mimic but always fall short, and Stephen King, for his crack-dream senarios that I walways want to mimic and always fall short.
TEH IND.
Mox Jet
If anyone wants to go and check out my first fic, its called Final Conflict
and I believe it's actually still on this page. Granted, you would only find
it for comedic purposes, as it is truly crap.
Actually, the first fic I ever started was a pokemon fic (*gasp*) midway through my freshman year. Realizing that was going nowhere, I switched to FF7 and started writing Final Conflict. Gag me with a stick, I must have been on crack when I did that story.
Before that, though, I came to this page through a link that someone gave on a Gamesages forum (where I was going under the dubious alias of Hitmonchan), and I checked it out. I said, "Hey, this fanfic stuff is pretty cool." That, and I was always a big CT fan.
Reading Nanaki is really what got me hooked. I revered the guy as basically a God. Granted, he e-mailed me around September '99 after I had a chapter of The Planeswalkers up. He said he liked my work. I think I hit the floor right there in disbelief. Nakster, I know you're at Yellowstone right now, but you were my biggest inpiration.
I don't really remember what happened next. I guess I just started writing, and I sort of teamed up with Nanaki, Cain and Night along the way. I finished Planeswalkers in February, and that's just about my biggest accomplishment to date.
I never expected to be much of anything in the fan fic community, but people started reading me and they told me they liked it. To this day, I still don't understand why, and I'll never really match up to Nanaki, but that never mattered. To many people write for the prestige or the for the fan mail. I just wrote because it was fun, and that's the best piece I can give to an aspiring author
*is still in shock at seeing Selphie's pic*
Anyway, that's my fanfic story. I wish I could do this professionally, and if I could ever pull in enough money, it would be like a dream job, but sometimes necessity comes before desire.
Nanaki
I wrote my first fanfic when I was seven years old. It was about an Atari
2600 game called "Moonsweeper." I was very proud of myself, because it was
2 and 1/4 pages long. Up until then, the most I'd managed to do was about
four paragraphs.
The first story I ever did that could be considered "book" length was also a fanfic. I went through a Trekkie phase in December 1995 and January 1996 (Two months was enough.), so of course, it was about Star Trek. It would have been a very SHORT book, but up until then, the longest I'd gotten to was 14 pages, so again, it was a landmark.
Now, as far as Chrono Trigger was concerned, I'd had the foundations of Mount Woe brewing in my head since the spring of 1997, before Icy's page even existed. However, back then, it was quite a ways back on my writing to-do list. I was busy at work on what still may be the best thing I've ever written, my epic-length original story, "Destiny of an Emperor." Yeah, Mount Woe is da bomb, but Destiny was darker, more violent, and had a lot more sex scenes. Plus, 80% of the main characters were dragons, my favorite species.
Anyway, my priorities got rearranged when I saw Icy's site. The fact that OTHER PEOPLE might actually read something I'd written made me get right to work on Mount Woe. However, I originally planned not to send it in until it was finished. That lasted about a month. In October of 1997, I broke down and sent the first three parts in. Things kind of blossomed from there.
Yeah, the site definitely changed my life. Thanks to Icy, I haven't written one paragraph of an original story since August of 1997. Sure, I've done other areas of fanfic... MST3K, Gundam, Tactics before Tactics was kosher... But I digress. The reader response I received for Mount Woe (and this was back when the page had had about 20,000 visitors, max) mutated the story dramatically. Originally, I planned to only cover up to Vigo's death. The fan response not only spurred me on to go up to the fall of Zeal, but also birthed Trials of the King, Tempo Trigger, Ertai's Story, Kaneta's Revenge, The Hero Civil War, and who knows what else. Okay, so most of those haven't been written yet, but they will be, mark my words.
I too, plan on writing professionally, but I don't think I'll go into books. Not until I've made my name elsewhere, at any rate. Print media is dying, and on top of that, the genres I would go into, fantasy and sci-fi, are HEAVILY saturated already. I'd rather go into TV. I'd love to be a writer on Conan O'Brien, Family Guy, or anything else with a similar degree of insanity.
Note that if I do eventually end up being a famous Hollywood producer, my retirement project is going to be "Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Next Generation." Start looking forward to fall 2036. It'll be a riot.
Nightsong
My first writing experience... geez, that's been a few years. Well, I found
Icybrian's site back when it was still on simplenet (back when the background
was still this tan color, not the cool ice thing he's got going now). I'd
read Cain's fanfic, Chrono Continuum, on a site somewhere that got shut down,
and I was trying to find it again (shame I know the guy doesn't come here;
he'd likely be amazed to hear me giving him this much praise). Anyway, I
got here. And I read the Chrono Trigger fanfics. And I loved them, especially
Nanaki's work. So I got inspired. I'd tried to write one fic in the past
(an FF7 thing, on paper, that was completely braindead and ran about fifteen
pages... and about four chapters, horrifyingly enough), but it had died on
me somewhere along the line, so I decided to start from scratch, with something
based on Chrono Trigger. So I wrote the first three chapters of Split Infinity,
a title I ripped directly from a Piers Anthony novel, and submitted the tale
to the committee, fully confident that my wonderful writing would be accepted.
Amazingly - believe me, it was a horrible little fic that involved the concept
of crossing dimensions, except there was no clear reason WHY the characters
should be crossing dimensions - it was accepted, and got put up on the page.
I waited for the fanmail to roll in, and didn't really write anymore on the
story.
Well, the fanmail didn't come in. After about seven months of this, after I got put on the "writers who haven't submitted anything in over six months" list that once existed, I decided I should try to write short stories, since obviously my talent wasn't in the long, serialized pieces. And, thanks to some Interactive story forums, (the CTIS that used to have a link here and my own Fantasy Finale Arts Forum, that replaced that link), it worked out a lot better. And now, I can actually write serialized work (with my 20-something chapter Xenogears thing actually up on the page, much to my current astonishment). Wow.
Oh, and yeah, I want to do this professionally. I'm just grateful to Icy and the committee members for accepting that first crappy fic I submitted; if it hadn't been, I probably wouldn't be writing today.
Sage of Ice
I always liked to write. It's my dream to actually have something published
someday. But I still have to practice. Everyone's gotta start somewhere.
However my biggest problem is that I can never finish a project once I start it. But then again I always tried to write epic originals...
However I made an attempt to write a Star Wars fic, which was my first attempt EVER at fanfiction. I never finished it. It was a stupid, boring plot that no one would have liked anyway (I made myself a character in it).
After I got into the "Legend of Zelda" series I had always wanted to go into fanfiction in that area. The problem was I had no one to share it with. My friends weren't into video games. My family had just gotten the internet and I was a little paranoid about giving out my e-mail (though I soon got over it).
That was where ff.net came in. *dodges a spitwad* I could post a fic there without giving personal info in public.
My first fic was a short story called "Majora's Mask," a sequel to the game. I wrote it in one morning, put it on the site and got incredible positive feedback from both authors I respect and authors I don't.
Shortly after that I wrote "Frozen Tears," a fic that was approved for this site only a few days ago. That really made my day by the way. It's a honor. After that I've written two more short zelda fics and now I'm working on my first "novel" zelda fic.
And the rest is history.
Wallwalker
Well, I first officially started writing fanfiction in 1994, which
was when I'd played FFVI. Now, ever since I was a kid I would imagine scenarios
with characters or places I liked in all kinds of things - TV shows, video
games, books, you name it. But for some reason, FFVI was the first thing
that made me start to write those ideas down on paper (or word processor,
actually.)
Granted, a lot of those early ideas were crap, involving such horrors as shameless SI and a number of Deux Ex Machina scenes. I didn't care at the time; I wasn't old enough, or experienced enough, to know that what I was writing was, well, crap. Now, of course, I cringe in horror at the thought of reading my old stuff. I've improved (or so I would like to think,) and at some point I'm going to go back to those old ideas and see how much I can salvage, probably into original stories and the like....
Anyway, I don't think I actually finished any fanfics I started until 2000 or thereabouts, which was when I finished a Brigandine story called "Power's Price", which I don't really care to share right now because it really needs editing. I've yet to finish a fan-novella, although I'm darn close to finishing "Memories are Fleeting." My main problem seems to involve too many works in progress at once, both fanfic and original. (It's kind of the opposite of writer's block.)
The Freezer Archives
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