Let me Tell You A Story

Once Upon A Time, a long time ago, in pretty much the same place I am now, in a cosmic sense, there I was, practically not able to breathe because I was reading a fanfic so funny and so awful and so meta that I still think about it to this day. It was not an objectively good story. It was an excruciatingly awful one, a Sailor Moon fanfic written by a young man with an obvious lack of knowledge about women’s anatomy or sexual behavior. (Or men’s, if we are to be honest.)  Some genius wrote a MST3K of it, using the Sailor Scouts (an indication of time and place) as the commentators. The result meta-story was howlingly funny.

It was around that time I decided that, unlike the vast majority of fanfic writers, I had both seen a woman naked and had sex with one, I ought to be able to do a better job of writing fanfic with, y’know, lesbian sex.

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But this story actually started far earlier than that. It actually begins in the 1970s, If I’m being honest.

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Star Trek had been a powerful factor in the general popularity of science fiction, but my father was an avid SF reader. I read whatever Dad read. This meant I read a lot of age-inappropriate stories, only a few of which I resent having read….and which was the genesis my undying loathing of Stanislaw Lem. As I detail in my review of the Yuri issue of SF Magazine on Okazu, I read a lot of “Best SF of XXXX Year” Hugo and Nebula award winner anthologies and I have a lot of bones to pick with those judges. Science fiction in the 1970s was home to men obsessing about sex and the “gotcha” endings and I began to hate it.

In the late 1970s I read a Star Trek novel that utterly traumatized me. It was so out of character, so exhaustingly emotional, so poorly written, it killed my interest in Star Trek novels and, ultimately all fanfiction, for decades. No, I won’t tell you which one. Some people loved it.  ^_^

So imagine my surprise 20 years later when I began reading fanfic for Xena: Warrior Princess…and it didn’t suck! I was pretty lucky. I was there when Melissa Good was starting up. Her stories later became the core of her Dar series. It was a delight to see her succeed professionally.

So 20 years after some extraordinarily shitty, yet-inexplicably published by a major publisher Star Trek fanfic disillusioned me as the possibility of the form, there I was taking up a keyboard and pounding out a Xena fanfic. It’s not the best thing I’d ever written even then. Now, I wouldn’t probably read it.  ^_^

There I was, happily staying up nights and going to bed at 4AM before working the next day writing Xena fanfic, when Sailor Moon entered my life. I fell in love with the Senshi. And…that was it. I was a fanfic writer. In the period of 1997-2001, I wrote more than 200 fanfic for dozens of series. I created The Fanfic Revolution, at least one member other than myself who has gone on to publish, and several of whom I still consider close friends.

In 2000 I had started a mailing list list for fans of lesbians in anime and manga and in 2002, renamed it Yuricon. I’ve written two novellas about the Yuricon mascot. As we approach our 20th anniversary, I’m working on a third novella for pop idol Yuriko and her friends.

I finished what I expect to be my last fanfic ever in 2018 with the conclusion to The Courtly Tales of Crystal Tokyo.

Just about that time, the webhost I’d been using for 20 years began a slow-motion implosion. One day I went to update “Worldshaking” Fanfic…but it was gone. I had just recently reupped the domain and the webhosting. The company was not reachable and after a lot of effort, I was wholly unable to get a final backup of the content, but I was able to transfer the domain. WSF has remained down since 2019, although I still have the stories and the files…which did not transport over to the new host correctly, of course. ^_^;

It’s been a long while since I’ve looked at any of this. 2020 seemed a good moment to rethink the entire site. Most of my writing now is original. I’m not sure I’ll write fanfic ever again. Instead I will be inspired by new fandoms to continue to write new work. I learned so much from fanfic and made so many friends and regret not one word I’ve written (well, actually there is a paragraph in one story I regret….)

Thank you for visiting “Worldshaking” Fanfic. Thank you reading my story. Here’s to the next 25 years – I hope I’ll see you again!

P.S. – the gif of Sailor Uranus at the bottom of every page has been with me since the very beginning. I was so excited to be able to put her here on this version too! She’s from Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon S: Jougai Rantou!? Shuyaku Soudatsusen (美少女戦士セーラームーンS: 場外乱闘！？主役争奪戦) for Famicom. Somewhere in this house is a floppy disk with the other Senshi and their attacks! ^_^