When I was thirteen years old, I came home one evening from church camp. I was tired and sweaty from days spent in the Texas summer heat. My dad had a big grin when I walked into the living room and he nodded toward the study. There, on the big desk that my great-grandfather built, was a shiny new Compaq computer with a phone line running into an actual built-in modem. We had the internet.

That night, I logged on for the first time. It was slow and would disconnect me every time there was a call. But after nine o'clock, I shut the door to the study and started exploring. The internet was still young then so there wasn't much to see. A lot of ill-colored websites made in Angelfire or Geocities. A lot of screens filled with text. But still, it was amazing.

The term fanfiction was long-known to those that read the great old printed fanzines. Usually fanzines were printed for sci-fi fandoms like Star Trek, Star Wars, and X-Files. When I first got online, a lot of the fanzines had started to archive their old submissions online. This was a couple of years before the inception of fanfiction.net so the sites were scattered with no hub. Somehow, I stumbled into one of those pages filled with text, but this text was about Star Wars.

I don't remember the name or even if there was shipping involved, but I know that it forever changed the way I used the internet. I was already a fan of the Star Wars extended universe books, so the idea of fanfiction wasn't such a foreign one. After all, those books often read like really long fics.

Soon after, theforece.net and The Corellian Embassy and fanfix.com all came into being. And I combed through story after story. I had my first taste of fandom, and my first ship. I was a Han and Leia fan, of course and I can still remember reading Marie's missing moments series for the first time and Leela Starsky's 40 Days to Bespin and Dianora's *ahem* adult fics.

And then I started to write. Badly. Very badly. But it was a start.

I kept reading, too. My love for Star Wars died away a bit and I delved into other fandoms like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eventually, fanfiction.net came into being. I can't quite remember what it was like when it opened, but I can remember that all of its pre-cursors were simply long pages with links to other sites.

Fanfiction.net exploded in popularity and it was around this time that I remember anime terms moving into non-anime fanfic. Suddenly there were lemons and yaoi and yuri and hentai. There were acronyms and this strange new trend of smashing names together to describe a ship. Suddenly, fanfiction was this real, common thing on the internet. It was no longer relegated to the die-hards and zine readers, suddenly it was part of the fabric and culture of the 'net.

And I kept writing. Still badly. Still without purpose or a voice. But I kept going.

Eventually, I decided to post my first fanfic. It was under an alias and I don't even remember the title or what it was about. I know it was in the Matrix section of ffn and I know it was awful. I eventually purged the account and kept practicing and practicing. I filled discs with stories that would never see the light of day and each one got a tiny bit better.

As I got older, I didn't write quite so much or read as much fanfic. I started concentrating on my art more and had other things to occupy my time. Of all things to bring me back in, it was seeing the movie A Knight's Tale. I was so pissed when I left the theater. Good idea for a film, terrible execution.

I started writing my idea of a way to fix it, again, never intending for it to see the light of day. By the time I got to 20,000 words or so, I realized I had a decent fic. I created my current account and I posted a chapter. To my immense surprise, people liked it. They begged for more. The reviews were addictive and being a real, concrete member of the fandom was pretty fun.

I finished that story and produced a sequel and a one-shot in a different ship (Simple) and then, I got busy again, lost interest in the fandom, moved on.

But I found others. I started reading Final Fantasy fanfics and Harry Potter and Farscape. And I wrote my own, once again, never to see the light of day. I love writing for myself and I consider it no different from the sketchbooks that I keep. It's all practice. They don't all have to be masterpieces and they don't all have to be for the world.

In 2006, I started a novel length Ronon/Teyla fic for the Stargate: Atlantis fandom (Sparring). It would eventually take me nearly two years to finish. I learned so much writing it and that experience has really added to my reluctance to commit myself to writing longer stories.

I wrote original stories too but I was in school and starting a career and writing was really placed on hold. Once I finished up Sparring and graduated and started working, I really let my art go. Once it was my job, I didn't want to do it at home anymore. So I started writing again and reading fanfic to fill the extra time.

I suppose this is where I started reading Jericho and Firefly and even more Harry Potter. And I also read the Twilight books.

Now, I often write fanfics because there is something I don't like about the canon. In the case of Twilight, I didn't like getting glimpses of these amazing secondary characters only to never have them pay off. I didn't like Edward and Bella very much. I didn't like the love-triangle and the very Mary-Sue nature of New Moon.

But I loved the Cullens. And I loved the world. And I wanted to play in it.

I wrote They'll Never Know (which would eventually become the first chapter of RBTL) in about thirty minutes and stashed it away on my hard drive. Again, I thought I would just write some things for me. I also wrote a little one-shot of a conversation between Rosalie and Edward that still lives on my hard drive. But Alice and Jasper were still in my head. Redefining Words was my way to fill in the blanks. I had all these little drabbles for the pair and decided to connect them. I liked the story well enough, so I posted. I was dipping my toes in, seeing how the water was. The response was positive enough to get me to post some more. At this point, I had several one-shots written and had decided to post them as a collection.

It's actually hard work, having a big, frequently updated story in a popular fandom. I spend a couple of hours, a few days a week responding to PMs and e-mails and reviews. I write whenever I have an extra moment and try to stick to an actual posting schedule.

I decided to write this essay because everytime I post, I get reviews and PMs that mention my talent or talk about how they wish they wrote better. Writing well takes practice and luck and more practice.

I make no illusions about my talent. I know I'm a decent enough writer but I can think of a dozen fanfic writers off the top of my head that I am in awe of. Everytime I sit down in front of a keyboard, I learn something and everytime I post a chapter or story, I second-guess myself, wondering if I learned enough. I found my voice as a writer sometime before writing Sparring and since then, writing has come easier for me, certainly, but it's still hard work and takes a ton of practice.

I also wrote this because I was thinking about the people that discount fanfic, especially the published authors (not all of them) and critics. Speaking from personal experience, there was no greater playground to hone my skill. Without fanfiction, I would have never found my voice as a writer.

In the last week, I ventured back in time to the world of Star Wars fic. I didn't go through ffn, but decided instead to see if any of my old haunts still existed. To my surprise, much was the same. fanfix.com was long gone but the little zine sites and ship repositories still remained. I sought out Marie's missing moments series and was blown away all over again. It was better than any Star Wars book, maybe better than Star Wars itself.

So, to those that discount fanfiction: You're reading the wrong ones.

And to those that are still looking for your voice: Don't be afraid to write crap, don't feel like you have to post everything, don't give up, and eventually it will get better and easier. And way more fun.

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And thanks to all that were concerned about the beta thing. The long fic is back on schedule and will include good grammar. I'm still kicking a title around but I will decide by the time I post chapter 34 of RBTL (later today). Now, coffee and writing time. It is Sunday, after all. :)