Confessing a deep, dark secret

(No, not that sort of secret. I have absolutely no connection with RTB, except being listed on the author links, and reading it every day :-) )

There's a fascinating discussion about fanfic over at HelenKay Dimon's blog that made me run late for work. (Sorry, I'm at work now and don't have the link handy.)

And here's my confession: I wrote fanfic once. I was about 9 or 10 at the time. But it was the first time that I wrote something, outside school, with the conscious 'I want to be a writer' thought in my head. And here's where the real embarrassment comes in - it was about Don and Judy from Lost in Space.

You can stop laughing, now. They didn't have Buffy and Harry Potter back in the early 70s, okay??? I had to make do with what I had, and with only 2 TV channels, that wasn't much. (Mr Ed just didn't do it for me.)

Of course it was a romance. There were kissing bits, too - or reference to them. I was only a kid, after all, and my limited knowledge meant that any of that stuff had to be glossed over with vague disappearing-into-the-distance-together references.

But the process of writing that story must have stimulated my imagination, because my own characters started coming alive in my head and spinning their stories. And although I didn't get really, really serious about being a writer until 3 or 4 years ago, I did a lot of daydreaming and unfocused, fun, writing in the intervening 30 or so years, purely for relaxation and enjoyment.

So with all those characters and stories, I have a very crowded head ;-)