Otter's Rock

thady wanted to know about the first fandom I participated in and did I have fandoms before I went online.

And yes, I had fandoms before I went online!  I just didn't have many people besides my parents and brother to gush over them with.  My parents raised me on Star Wars and Star Trek: The Next Generation; I watched the shows, but also I was an avid reader.  And, at that time (in the late 80s/early 90s), there wasn't much YA SFF that got into our small town public library.  I DEVOURED books.  I was bitterly upset that the library would only let one check out 20 books at a time--with YA books, I'd go through that in a week by the time I was in fourth or fifth grade.  I've always been a fast reader.  I can still remember the day when the librarian led me to the adult SFF section and showed me the shelf of Star Trek books--I was in heaven!  I read all of them and then started working my way through the rest of the section.  And I got my parents to take me to a (very small) local con at which James Doohan was appearing.  Basically, it was "Jimmy Doohan signing autographs, and oh, yeah, there's a few dealers and other stuff, too."  So that was my first fandom.  Classic Trek wasn't on TV for me to watch, but TNG was; I watched TNG and read TOS novels.*  Even then, worldbuilding was WHERE IT'S AT for me.  I LOVED Diane Duane's books for that reason.  I still have a notebook with a geneology of Spock's kids and their families--his daughter was a priestess and in line to take over from T'Pau and married to a human starship captain.

*BTW, the 80s and early 90s had some AWESOME TOS novels--most were written by either fanfic authors or professional authors who were fans.  You could really tell it wasn't just work for hire--they knew Star Trek and they LOVED it.  Some of it was pretty cracky, there were lots of really obvious author-insert characters, but at the same time there is so much love and so much fun.

In my senior year of High School, second semester (i.e. after I had gotten in to the college I wanted) I dropped Honors Physics in favor of a period as a library aide.  (Such a slacker!)  The librarians were both old-school SF lit geeks, and we'd talk about that.  But I would also spend time fooling around on the computers when there was no work, and it was then I found a Star Wars fanfic archive.  I was in love!  (It's been vanished into the aether for well over a decade; it's the archive that taught me to SAVE FAVORITE FICS ON MY OWN COMPUTER because otherwise they will VANISH INTO THE MISTS OF TIME.)  I set out to read the archive, by which I mean EVERY STORY IN IT, and my Aspergers makes me anal enough that it was a while before I realized that I could ... skip fics that didn't interest me or that weren't well-written.  And even longer than that before I could bring myself to actually skip fics without reading them.

Eventually I found other archives and LJ, and the rest is history.

NINE DAYS LEFT ON THE MEME!