My Life as a Fanfic Writer

Fanfiction is an integral part of me. Without it, I would be nothing. It's turned to an addiction but a healthy one at that. Fanfiction made me the writer that I am today, and I don't care if you think I'm shitty, BUGGER OFF. Not counting poetry, fanfiction comprises over half of my total works, so yeah, it's about time I spill the beans about my life as a fanfic writer.

There were three main factors which led to my discovery of fanfiction: first was the anime boom of 1999. I was in Grade 6 then, young, naive, easily taken by GMA7 and ABSCBN's marketing. My obsession with anime was helped by the second factor, the Internet. It was a relatively cheap source of information, waaaay cheaper than a trip to Japan or buying stuff from Comic Alley. Then we come to the third factor, which is the sudden death of our TV. With that loss, I became unable to get my daily dose of TV anime, and so had to depend more on the Internet.

It was on one of these Internet sessions that I discovered, quite accidentally, fanfiction. It happened so quickly; I didn't even realize I had clicked that bold, TNR word until the page of fanfiction appeared before me. Thank goodness it explained what fanfiction was, or gullible as I was then, I would have believed every single word fed to me. And believe it or not, the thought of two guys having sex simply did not occur to me.

I joined a fanfiction group on what was then Egroups. Only then did I learn the basic jargon of fanfiction writing, which was so fruity it was almost difficult to resist reading. At that time, I programmed myself to stay away from LIMEs and LEMONs, for fear of corrupting my then not-so-corrupted mind. This was rather easy, because fanfiction have to be marked to distinguish certain fics (specially limes and lemons) from the rest.

The twist is already hinted above, and it took the form of an unmarked lemon lying around in some website. The title was nice, so, trigger-happy pubertal idiot as I was, I read it.

And so my mind was devirginized. Quite literally. The feeling was like.......a virgin doing an orgy. It was so graphic, too graphic for a non-lemon reader like me. AND IT WAS BOY x BOY TOO, so do you get me now?

I was still in Grade 6 then.

A thousand shudders after the incident, I wrote my first fic, which was the closest I could to a boy x boy. And then I got my first reviews. I realized being praised and criticized felt exhilarating, because I was so lucky to receive such well-rounded reviews.

I continued writing fics. List-fics were the trend then, and I joined the fun. It was then that I learned to wield a sarcastic pen---er, keyboard. Then I stepped up a bit and became a judge in the first Takuhitsu Fanfiction Awards. I was twelve, and as you can see, I published my real effing name for the whole world to see. Nobody'd believe it was my real name anyway, just sounded like exotic gibberish from somewhere.

It was, I think, around this time that I got over my earlier experience with a lemon and started to consciously read them. And I started to appreciate them, love them, become obsessed with them. Until I stopped reading fics with hetero pairings. I became an exclusively shounen-ai reader. I was, I think between twelve and thirteen years old.

Then after Takuhitsu 2000, our ml died a natural death. Many members switched to lurking, so my fic supply thinned. There was a vain attempt to hold a Takuhitsu 2001, but it didn't push through. I was a freshman in high school when I joined the ranks of the lurkers.

I did not write anything for two years after that. Absolutely nothing, except for school. I became busy with other things: XGames and Takeshi Yasutoko, Pokebishies, acads (NOT!!!) and blahblahblah. Such was the state of things until I reached my third year in high school.

It was a renaissance for me: I discovered the beauty of Slam Dunk, got introduced to Jrock, rediscovered Fanfiction.net, restarted writing poetry. Around 2003, the summer before my senior year in high school, I took the biggest leap, I'd ever take till then: I wrote my first lemon. It happened that it was my first Slam Dunk fic too. I relished the reviews. Then I wrote milder fics. One of them is still an ongoing series. I also wrote for other series like Gravitation and Rurouni Kenshin. It was only then that I appreciated Fanfiction.net, even though they killed me once for a lemon that's not supposed to be there anymore. But I resurrected anyway, and more fruity than ever.

And then, shortly after I wrote the tenth chapter of my ongoing, OUR COMPUTER DIED after over five years of loyal service. I was on the second semester of my freshman year in college.

It was a big blow to me, because I had unfinished work stored in there, and several stories of which I had no spare copies of. I had also come to depend on it for encoding and data-gathering. I could not afford to spend on Internet cafes. I was so depressed and I didn't write anything again for two years.

It was my sister Puying that got me up and about again. She held me at knife-point (you all know it's a figure of speech, right?) and told me to continue my ongoing. She even printed out the ten uploaded chapters of the series so I can refresh my memory. That single act of kindness really got me out of my hiatus and I started writing again. I had learned many things in my absence, and one of them was the use of other writing media besides the computer. I learned to trust my pen and paper again.

And here I am now.

The point of all this is the amount of risks and surprises I had to take to become the fanfic writer I am today. I know I'm not the best there is, and hopefully I'm not one of the worst, but in the process I realized it was not as easy as it looks, and it took a lot of determination, pain, and love to keep up with it. And it's not just fanfiction, it is everything else.