Sex: not so much anymore, er, I mean, Gender: female.

Age: old enough to know better, young enough to be trusted.

Wow, if only all this, all this fanfic, had been available when I was young... I would've eaten it all up. I read my first fanfic back in the Stone Age. It wasn't even a 'fanzine,' such a thing didn't exist yet, real or electronic, and I wouldn't've understood what the word meant anyhow. No, this was a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of a mimeograph that had been passed around at this really crazy thing where a bunch of fans of Star Trek got together at a hotel; they called it a convention, or 'con' for short. I of course hadn't gone to such a thing, but my sister got a copy of the fan-story from a friend who got it from another friend and she let me read it.

It was incredible. Someone had taken my beloved Star Trek characters and actually thought up a new adventure for them and, most amazingly, had written it down! For other people to read! Amazing!

This unknown person's story told how a kind, presumably beautiful, young woman who worked at a 20th Century-era mental hospital had a patient who was very good looking and charismatic, but went crazy whenever anyone spoke his name: James or Jim. But the woman called him Jimmy, so he was always calm with her, and she began to fall a little bit in love with him. Well, he turned out to be none other than the dashing Captain James Kirk, kidnapped, brainwashed by the Klingons, and sent back in time. Spock and Bones rescued him, Spock partially erasing the woman's memories. It was all very bittersweet and sad when Kirk said goodbye and the woman went back to her life, never knowing what she was missing. Thirty years later I remember that story so clearly. For all I know, the character's name was Mary Sue.

There was another story, too, not so dear to my romantic heart, but fun. It was obviously a sequel to another earlier story, but we never saw that one. I think I even remember the title: 'Visit to a Strange Planet Revisited.' --Okay, I just googled it, it's 'Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited,' and I can't believe it's one of the earliest and most famous RPFs of our current era! Talk about getting in on the ground floor! (lol) It involved a transporter malfunction that mixed up the real Enterprise crew with the actors on the Star Trek show, the first story (the one I never read) being the real crew's adventures on Earth, and the sequel (the one I read) being the actors' adventures on the ship. It was written in 1976 and I think that's just about the time I read it.

Well, so here I am, all these years later, contributing myself to the billions of words written by enthusiastic fans. There are worse fates...