Finally getting around to replying to this thread!
I discovered fanfic in the summer of '99. It was Millennium era, and I was obsessed with BSB and, like a lot of you, just surfing around for BSB sites one day when I found this one called JJ and JoJo's Bsb Page or something like that. It had a Brian story on it called "Blind Love." I clicked on it, not really knowing what it was, and thought it was so cool that someone had written a story about the Backstreet Boys. I had never heard of fan fiction before, for any fandom. I read this whole story in one sitting, and it made me cry, and I thought it was the best thing ever, even though it was this very unrealistic teenybopper romance written by a 13-year-old LOL. I printed the whole thing out (50 pages of computer paper - I got in trouble for that LOL) and put it in a binder so I could read it whenever I wanted, since we of course had dial-up at the time, so my internet time was limited. I actually still have that binder with that story in it. I showed it to my friends at a sleepover, and we all read it together, and they thought it was awesome too LOL.
Anyway, there was a sequel to that story and a different story on that site, and once I had read all those, I went looking for more, and the rest is history. I spent the entire summer of '99 completely OBSESSED with reading Bsb fanfic.
I never even considered writing my own until a few months later; I had clicked on a story that sounded really good, but it turned out to just be a short story, and I was left unsatisfied and wanting more, and that's what gave me the idea for the first fanfic I started writing. I just wrote it in a notebook at first, then transferred it to the computer, but never finished it or posted it anywhere. But that was enough to give me the writing bug, and then I got another story idea, and that one I did finish and eventually got brave enough to get hosted somewhere. I started my site a few months after that, in April 2000.
I don't remember exactly how I found AC, but I think it was also through reading Ground Zero here. And if we're playing six degrees of Mare, I hosted Mare's first story, I believe before she started her own site or was posting here. Mizpah.
I remember reading the chapters she sent me at work, when I was supposed to be doing my summer job LOL.
What's also cool is that the author of the first fanfic I read, JJ/Jen, became a friend of mine. It just so happened that she writes the exact kind of stories I love, medical drama tearjerkers with a side of romance, and I continued to read her stories as she wrote them (and they got a lot better as she grew up), and then she started reading mine, and even though she doesn't write anymore, we're still friends on Twitter. I think it was fate that I found HER stories first because they were the perfect kind to turn me on to fanfic.
