Every so often whilst wandering the internet I will stumble over some reference to a.c.f-f (alt.comics.fan-fiction) and/or the crazy folks therein. It’s a startlingly pleasant flashback to the hours I spent online in college writing fanfic, reading fanfic, and generally basking in the glory days of the alt.*** newsgroups.

Those were the days of Comic Fan-Fiction Authors’ Network (CFAN) and the Comic Book Fan-Fiction Awards (CBFFAs), the days of mighty round-robins that inevitably got hijacked by the bunny slippers.

I read comics on and off, but until I fell into the joyous chaos of acf-f, I never really got caught up in the story. Fan fiction gave the characters a new depth, a new veneer of reality that the comics didn’t have the time or the inclination to explore.

Heck, most of them were better than the canon stories and I wanted to read them all! … Or at least as many a I could. (This was in the days before Google and finding fanfic was rather a hit or miss endeavor.)

Once I started reading I started writing, because my Muses have no common sense– I did mention I had read more fanfic than canon, right? Thus there was sillyfic, and more sillyfic, and even some longer ficing attempts that never went anywhere. (Still haven’t finished off the Dreamer-series, erg.)

For some unknown reason I was invited into a writing group full of awesome writers who I looked up to like nobodies business. And lo, did I hone my powers of silly for the good of mankind.

But mostly I just tried to make people laugh.

When I left college I wandered back out of the fandom and I’ve missed it ever since. Every so often I go poking about again, trying to see if that magic still exists, but the internet is too wide and too vast.

Thanks to the ubiquitous reach of the modern day ‘net there are more fandoms and more fan fiction than I could ever hope to read. Some of it better, some of it worse– but on the whole, it just makes me long for the smaller sandboxes of yore.

I miss you oh golden glory days of silly– maybe I will find you again someday, maybe I won’t, but I will always remember you.

* Title is a homage to the ever awesome Apocalypse, Soon-ish (or: Days Of Future Last Tuesday Evening, Just Before The Football) by Phil Foster