My first brush with "true" fandom was in locating fanfiction in the most random places on the internet. Then I got addicted to fanfix.com and started submitting my own works in 1997. Somewhere just after The Phantom Menace was released, I got an offer from a writer in Illinois who asked if she could put one of my stories in her fanzine, "I Care." That started a 'zine and writing partnership that lasted until she decided to leave Star Wars for Lord of the Rings. I'm not going to mention my thoughts on that, since she's still a friend. She was, in fact, the one person who wrote me more frequently as a missionary than my family.

Then I came back to the "real world" after being a missionary, only to find that fanzines were a seriously dying breed. I didn't see as many of them out there in circulation and a lot of the friends I knew as SW fans were turned off by Attack of the Clones without even waiting for Revenge of the Sith.

I was very, very happy to find that Star Wars Outsider is back in the running at www.starwarsoutsider.com. It has all of my favorite elements, and then some! And, of course, if I can ever get my darn story to work for me, I'll be hopefully contributing to them.