Blaugust Day 6 — TGTCML: Discovering the Internet

This is part of the Blaugust series!

In my previous post, I talked about how, as a teen, I began writing a fan fiction of my favorite game, Final Fantasy II/IV, before I even knew what the Internet was. Once I discovered the Internet, a whole new, wild world opened up before me. For starters, I had access to information I never had before, such as the fact that the characters in FFIV had last names! Wow! (No, seriously, we didn’t get that information in the US version…)

But the most important thing the Internet provided me with was a platform to share my writing, back before there were blogs or content management systems or anything like we use now. I taught myself to code rudimentary HTML, enough to create those oldskool pages with the midi music, animated images, and scrolling text. You know the kind, right?

Okay, so maybe my sites weren’t so garish. I hope?

I had a number of Geocities accounts, which allowed me to design and post webpages for free on the Internet. I soon realized the potential in this as a writer, and in 1998, I created a site that housed my FFIV fanfic, Coming of the Darkstar (warning: old writing needs editing). I took the old hand-written pages and painstakingly began to type them into HTML format using the WebTV we had at the time (still no computer in my house, but at least we had Internet!). The original story wasn’t finished, however, and I pushed to get it done over winter vacation in 2000.

Note, this story has been edited and re-written several times, so it’s not the exact original hand-written fanfic of old. I still need to give it another good editing now that it’s been several years not having read through it.

During the early years of online fan fiction writing, there weren’t a massive number of fan pieces out there for FFIV (or in general). This was due to the fact that you almost had to know HTML to put together your own site back then. So, anyone who did this kind of thing ended up getting quite a bit of attention. It was even more rare to find an online fantasy web novel at the time, so Darkstar drew a bit of a crowd. And as a young adult writer, it was great!

I tapped into my audience by creating forums and a role play email list (don’t see these much anymore). This was the foundation for what eventually became Sygnus.org.

-To Be Continued-

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