Hi. I'm Zakheriash (gesundheit, I know...), better known to some as Ash, and others as Zak, and still others as Chaos. I'm actually just using this post to test a couple things with new memberships, but figured hey, I haven't been around much for several years, so probably I was due to post something other than just site maintenance stuff.
So...I have been a fanfiction writer since I was old enough to tell stories and way before I even knew what fanfiction was. My sister loves to remind me that I started with making up stories about how the "Big Bad Wolf" was actually the good guy. My very first fandom that I remember actually writing down stories for was Scooby Doo! Yeah, I was like 6 but hey, I still loved the Scooby gang enough to write stories about them (that never got shared with anyone other than one of my sisters).
The first fandom where I actually SHARED my writing was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I even created a rather large fanfiction archive back in the day when there wasn't an app like efiction (or AO3) or similar and every story submitted to my site was hand coded into HTML and manually added to a page of links. My best friend and I spent HOURS proofreading and posting other people's stories. That continued until I could no longer even stand to read one more story about a vampire named "Angle". I still have a major soft spot for the fandom, but I was majorly relieved when fanfiction.net became a thing and I decided to shut down the manual archive.
I got into BSB fiction over a bet. I wasn't a fan (didn't dislike them, but couldn't have told you anything whatsoever about them other than "I Want it That Way" was catchy and confusing.) It was born of a discussion about fanfiction; the person I was talking with had NO IDEA that I ran a huge fanfiction archive or was a life-long fanfic writer. They pretty much were of the opinion that "nobody with any writing talent writes fanfiction". I, of course, vehemently disagreed. I shared a few examples from other writers. But from there the conversation delved into what were "legit" fandoms. My posit was that ANY fandom can have good stories told. I was willing to put my money where my mouth is and they picked the fandom and I wrote the story. Hello, Ground Zero. I made several friends in the fandom as I researched and wrote, so when fanfiction.net decided that they were going to eliminate "Real Person Fiction", I really wanted a place to keep the fandom writers together, so Absolute Chaos (which actually used to be a completely non-fanfic site lol) was co-opted and turned into a new fanfic archive. And the rest is history.
Alas, I have had to mostly drop out of fanfiction writing (and reading, which I also greatly miss) due to life getting in the way. I regret nothing (well, okay a few things) and wouldn't trade raising my niece and nephews for all the time in the world. COVID brought everyone home again (I was almost an empty nester...). My day job turned into a work from home situation and has been busier than ever with the COVID crisis, so that's been...interes
ting.
I am about to actually become an empty nester for real (where does the time go?), so am hoping that I can start getting back into writing. And being forced to figure out how to save A.C. reminded me how much I used to enjoy working on a website, so I hope to be able to start that up again and hopefully not fade completely out of site (
) again. Efiction has been an unsupported application for some time now, and I've kind of wanted to tackle writing my own upgrade to it to make it more compliant and hopefully iron out some of the issues that caused us to have to shut off reviews (I may not have written anything for a long while, but I do remember how much those reviews meant to me and how much they mean to other writers.) I can't guarantee anything, but it is one of my personal goals to at least take a stab at making reviews possible again (without opening up to lots of spam...
Anyhoo, that's a long enough post (I babble, therefore I am) to test what I need to test and to basically say "hi" and introduce myself to those of you who are still around and those who joined after I faded out of the fandom...