Technically, I was into writing fanfic before I even knew what fanfic was. Back when I was in seventh grade, a couple of friends and I claimed characters from various shows and wrote stories back and forth with them. The primary fandoms were Real Ghostbusters, DuckTales, and Thundercats. This was long before mainstream internet (1988 or so) and it was loads of fun. We kept this up throughout high school, although we never admitted this to anyone else, because back then, this would have been considered super geeky. It was awkward enough to be in your teens and admit to watching something like DuckTales or Ghostbusters, much less write stories about them.
However, as far as real "fic" goes, that didn't come for me until the late '90s, after college. My stories in the '80s were laughable. Not only were they out of character, but because it was just for fun, I didn't bother with punctuation or prose or anything important to make it readable. Rather than deal with dialogue tags, I just assigned each character his or her own pen or marker color, and what was written in that was what they said. Necessary narrative or action description was done in pencil, in parentheses. Talk about bad fic writing! Oh, I'm so glad the internet did not exist back then.
The first fandom I wrote and posted stories online for was Thundercats. When I discovered online fandom in 1997, I searched a number of my favorite shows, new and old. Ghostbusters, Darkwing Duck, Thundercats, Voltron, Jem, Forever Knight, and X-Files. Thundercats was what stuck with me, though, because the websites and fandom at the time were so much fun. The Ghostbusters fandom came off as too pretentious and serious, X-Files and Forever Knight were too big and intimidating, and while I dabbled in Jem, there were individuals that took things as way too serious business, and it turned me off to writing or participating. I lurked on some Darkwing Duck and Voltron websites for a while, but eventually, the fun of Thundercats pulled me in to that full time.
The Thundercats fandom of the late '90s was awesome. People posted funny stuff, there were tons of creative and awesome websites. Yeah, they were ugly HTML with no features by today's standards, but nobody was snobby about it back then, aside from a few, who were pretty much laughed off by the majority of the fandom as being too high on themselves. I don't know how many of you reading this still remember things like WileyKitt's Funkyass Homepage, JackalMann's Castle Plundarr, BlindLynxo's Page, Cassio2X's page, Lefty's Thundercat House, and various AOL and Geocities homepages people put up, but they were awesomesauce. I joined in the fun with my own site, and now it and Mumm-Ra's Pyramid are pretty much the only remaining pages of that type still on the internet from back in that day.
Most of you reading this probably don't know that I wrote a series of Thundercats fanfics before I braved submitting any to archives. That's because I never posted those, and I'm very glad of that. They had a Sue in them that burned. (A child of Alluro and Cheetara born from a one night stand where he hypnotized her for kicks. This character had all sorts of powers, and the OOC in general in them just was... bad, to put it mildly. Trust me.) The first fic I was proud of enough to post was Running Amok, my Thundercats/X-Files humor crossover in which an experimental device created a dimensional gap that brought the Lunatacs into the real world to cause mayhem, the Thundercats came out to stop them, and Mulder and Scully had to deal with the total WTF-ery of a cartoon coming alive. I had a blast writing it, and it was well-received. I first posted that story on Lady Silver's long-gone archive in the fall of 1997, and in 2000 I revised it to fix and expand some scenes. That's the version online today.
Not long after that I posted some "Weird Stories," a genre of anything-goes, OOC just-for-the-lulz type stories that was quite popular in the fandom at the time, and the first few fics of what became my main continuity for the Thundercats fandom. And the rest, as the saying goes, is history.
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