Midsummer Hop post - A day late...

Welcome to my little bit of the world for the SFR Brigade Midsummer Blog Hop! I hope you’ve been enjoying all the other great posts from SFR Brigade members about their works and their experiences!

I’m taking a different road than most other posters – I want to tell you how June 23, a day away from the actual date here, is special to me. But first we have to go back in time…

*insert Dr. Who Tardis whooshing noises*

It was 1993 and I was working as a security officer in the day and as a fanfic writer at night. The X-Files were ripping up the airwaves as the coolest television show around and this here internet thing was actually becoming available to the general public. You only had a web page if you paid an extravagant amount of cash to your provider so there were only a few web pages and most of them university or private industry pages but there was this thing called Usenet – a huge bulletin board where fans of all stripes and shapes could hang out and post their thoughts and stories. Alt.tv.x-files and Alt.tv.x-files.creative being the two major newsgroups I visited with my creaky old Mac.

I used to post stories weekly, almost daily. You can still find a lot of them at fanfiction.net – not my best work, looking back, but it was a brave new world where you were breaking ground both as creating a fandom around the world and exchanging fanfic in seconds – not waiting for a fanfic to be published months, maybe years after you wrote it.

And I received fan mail. Every author enjoys feedback and I wasn’t anyone special – I loved to get emails telling me how much they enjoyed my work.

Then, one day, an email popped into my box. It wasn’t initially anything special, just another note telling me how much he enjoyed my original character, Jackie St. George and how I wrote her into my fanfics not necessarily as a Mary Sue but as a sort of Greek Chorus yelling for Mulder and Scully to get together.

I thanked him for the lovely email.

He thanked me for thanking him.

We wrote.

We called.

Bell Canada was saved from bankruptcy by my phone bills.

We met.

And on June 23, 2000 we were married. Technically this week the Wookie and I celebrate 12 years of marriage but we count it as much, much longer – since 1993 and that little email he was brave enough to send out to this odd fanfic writer.

The moral of the story, as I tell people – first, please send feedback to your authors. Tell them what you liked, what you hated – just write them. We need that feedback, we crave that feedback and we’ll love you for it.

Second – never be afraid to take a chance. The Wookie says daily he’s still shocked at me marrying him and I point out that he started the whole thing with a single email. His fault, in other words.

And it’s his fault I’ve been able to stay home and write for all these years. All of my works are because he allows me to stay home and do nothing but write. So you can blame him for the “Blaze of Glory” trilogy and all the upcoming books in the “Blood of The Pride” series.

For us the entire last week of June is a happy time. We hope it becomes one of yours as well.

*smiles*

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