I'm older than most of you, so I met my first fanfiction in the early Sixties. Fanfic was a different beast back then - while there were computers (the first one I met was an IBM 704) there was no internet. Fanfiction happened in fanzines, printed on paper and circulated by mail. I did a decent amount of publishing - started out using a mimeograph, but quickly went over to a ditto machine. Life is easier when your duplicator uses cleaning fluid instead of sticky, irrevocable black ink.
Fanfiction was fiction written by fans, though it didn't need a specific reference point. The first I clearly remember having read was
The Masked Marvels of Mollusk-on-the-Marsh, by Don and/or Maggie Thompson. The first I ever wrote was called
The Strange Case of the Misplaced Superhero, which can be found at
http://washuu.net/Supers/strangecase.htm . It wasn't the best, but having it around keeps me humble. It was closer to a Superman fanfic than anything else.
In those early days I wanted to be a comic artist/writer, and I did have several fan strips published, in the Texas Trio's
Star Spangled Comics. But I ended up having to make a living, and though I read fanfic when it became available, I didn't write much until I retired. I did do illustrations for Ruth Berman's Star Trek zines, but that was about it. These days? I've only written a few fanfics since retiring, but by damn, they were
good.
So: why am I here? I was doing a search for a certain fanfic, and somehow ended up on this page. It made me feel talkative. So I wrote a very brief history of my interactions with the stuff. Book perhaps to follow, perhaps not. - Ellen
