The Sailor Moon Fanfic page is alive once again. It was a surprisingly complicated rebuild.
Almost 25 years have passed since some of these stories were written (and, probably read, if I’m being honest. ^_^) Some of the stories had to be found on Internet Archive, others were reformatted for the first time in more than a decade – some of these had been ported to at least 4 different iterations of the site and had become kludgy with code relics and random blockquotes. While reviewing these stories, I learned something very interesting.
Stories I had written long years ago, mostly for text-based mailing lists, were far less time-consuming to reset than stories written directly on the Internet. It’s not just that insto-formatting of websites and blogging platforms are more persnickety and less likely to work if a single thing isn’t right. It’s also that when we were writing in text, with *this* indicating emphasis, it never stopped being readable, no matter what the device or screen or, now, the platform. The spacing was, sometimes a bit of a nightmare. Like printing presses, text on mailing lists developed random widows and orphans when being cut and pasted elsewhere.
Quite a lot of the stories are impossible for me to read now. The things those stories were for or the issues they were were working through aren’t relevant to me two decades later…or I just don’t like them. ^_^ But as I read them, I was reminded how many of them mention the Fanfic Revolution. I’m reminded of the endless hours we all spent reading and writing and endlessly bullshitting about our fandoms. Thank you to all the folks of the FR – it was a lot of fun and you helped me hone writing skills which will never be world shaking, but have at least allowed my fanfic to be “Worldshaking!” ^_^