The first website I ever created was for fanfic.

About ten years ago (December 1995, to be exact) I got on the internet for the first time. It was AOL. Lame, I know, but there wasn't much choice back then. It was there that I found other people who read Star Wars books. And they introduced me to fanfic.

It wasn't something widely talked about on the AOL Fan Forum - fanfic discussion was forbidden and quickly stopped by the moderators. But word got out anyway, and via a links site I found one of the internet's first SW fanfic sites.

Back then, it was called simply "The Star Wars Fan Fiction Site." Later, when domain names became easier to acquire, it became fanfix.com. And it was a revelation to me.

Now granted, I'm now old and bitter and willing to admit that a lot of fan fiction, like a lot of everything, was (and is) simply not very good. But at the time I was just amazed that people actually wrote unauthorized SW stuff. They wrote the stuff that Bantam wouldn't touch. It didn't have to follow the exact timeline of the books or the movies. They had complete freedom. And I completely soaked it up.

I read almost everything on fanfix, and scoured newsgroups and the handful of other existing websites. I eventually joined a mailing list called Club Jade that played host to many of my favorite authors. Most CJers have long since given up on fanfic, but I'm still a member of the list, and I'm still friends with dozens of wonderful people I met there. They remain one of the most fantastic fan groups I've ever known.

In spring 1996, desperate to add to the fandom community - some way, some how, and I just wouldn't settle for just another generic "I love SW" fan site - I decided to start a fanfic newsletter. I called it "Certain Point of View" and I included fanfic and novel news (one of the Bantam editors was a regular poster on AOL, and would occasionally leak tidbits,) fanfic reviews, and the occasional article. It did pretty well; I started out emailing it to folks, but it wasn't long before I started building it in HTML on my AOL web space. I had a small group of reviewers, and another friend even did a regular column on fanzines, which was the main way people got fanfic before the internet.

CPOV was my crash course in the internet and web design. And although I still loved and read fanfic, I was having a hard time keeping the site updated. I'd lost the writing and reviewing bug, and I wanted to focus more on design. I redid the site a few times, even had it picked up and hosted by a major fan site for a while, but it stopped being fun. I shut down CPOV for good in the middle of my freshman year at college, in the midst of fanboy politics and real life stress. I tried to start a old-school zine in web form with a site called Parsec12; we put out two or three issues and then it faded, quietly. I eventually ended up running the website for the CJ mailing list, which now has one of the oldest collections of SW fan fiction on the internet, (Fanfix went down for good several years ago) eventually turning it into an active fandom news blog.

I don't regret doing CPOV at all. My archival redesign of the site was one of the key factors in getting my first web design job at the college newspaper, which lead directly to my current job. Who says fandom never taught you anything?

I still read fanfic, although I've gotten much, much pickier than I was back in the day. I keep up with the TFN fanfic boards, one of the major sources for new stories, but I'm not really as active as I used to be. The true heir to CPOV would be swrecs, a SW fic recommendation community I started on Livejournal. It's much more casual than CPOV ever was, but it's far more suited to the fandom community as it is now.

I love fanfic. No matter how many truly awful stories I may run across, I love the simple concept of it. I love that someone - anyone - can sit down and write an in-depth story explaining why Luke was badly in need of Prozac for most of the Bantam books, no matter what the official explanation may be. I love that the people who want Anakin and Padme to live happily ever can let them live happily ever after. I love that anyone can take characters with five lines (or no lines) in a movie and give them a complete life of their own. I love that someone can go write a story about the contractors on the second Death Star. I love that if someone doesn't like the Expanded Universe or the prequels or the NJO or, well, whatever, they can go out at write their own version, or simply ignore them. And then they can share these stories with... well.. anyone.

I love the possibilities. Don't stop thinking about them. Star Wars is not in a box. George put it out here, hundreds of actors and writers and editors and prop/costume folks can make it their own, and so do we. On some level - not the legal one, of course, but a still very tangible space - it's ours.