by Ryan Mathews

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March/April 1998

You may notice the difference in the date for this month's column. No, I'm not going bimonthly. I'm just taking a month off. There are various reasons for this, which I'll get into in a moment.

But first, I want to make amends for an omission in last month's column. Due to a screw up while doing my research, I neglected to mention one of the best Oh My Goddess! sites on the Web. The Helper Goddess Office is home to a wealth of information about the series, as well as a lot of just plain neat stuff. The only real criticism I have about this site is the three pages you have to go through to get to the real home page. However, once you're there, you'll see why the page is worth visiting multiple times. I especially like the fan-fiction section, which, among others, features my own story The Green-Eyed Monster.

Which brings us to the main reason why I've decided to take a month off. You see, this month's topic is Fan-Fiction Sites. In preparation for this column, I sampled upwards of 400 websites related to fan-fiction. It made me realize just how much I miss writing myself, especially when I kept seeing my own stories popping up all over the Web.

My involvement with fan-fiction is a long one. It began in January of 1991. I had just recently been introduced to anime by a fellow Comp Sci grad student at the State University of New York at Buffalo. At the time, my favorite anime was The Dirty Pair, even though I'd never seen any of it. My exposure to the series consisted of the Studio Proteus comic book and a translated script to Project Eden. I had hunted down all the back issues of the comic, but the current series, A Plague of Angels, was having problems.

When the third issue was two months late, I went a little nuts. I'd read the second issue so many times, my copy was nearly falling apart. Starved for new material, my mind began to create a story of its own. When I realized that there was enough material in my head for a complete story, I decided to write it down. I called the story Big Bang. It took 48 pages of legal-pad paper, using both sides.

By the second page, it had already hit me that other people might be interested in seeing the story. So when I returned to UB after the winter break, I posted (for the first time) to rec.arts.anime and asked for permission to post the story. I had never received so much email in my life. I received as many as twenty messages a day from people who were missing parts of the story, or who simply wanted to discuss it with me.

The positive response inspired me to continue writing, and I wrote five more Dirty Pair stories over the next few years. Others were also inspired to write, and soon a new newsgroup, rec.arts.anime.stories (now known as rec.arts.anime.creative) was created to hold the stories. The existence of this group inspired even more writers, and led to the creation of mailing lists to discuss stories before they were posted to the group.

I later learned that no one had ever done that before, posted a complete anime fan-fiction story to Usenet. It's for this reason that I am sometimes referred to as the "father" of Internet anime fan-fiction. Although, let's face it, it would have happened with or without my help. Wherever there are fans, there will be fan-fiction, and it was only a matter of time before anime fans turned to writing. It's also not entirely true that I was the first anime fan writer on the Internet. A search of FTP sites back in '91 produced a few stories and at least one person has told me of a short piece that predated "Big Bang" on rec.arts.anime, although he can't remember any details.

As time has gone by, and I've moved from being a student to working forty hours a week, my productivity as a writer has slumped, but I've remained involved. At the first Katsucon in 1995, I chaired a panel on fan-fiction. It was a huge success, and I've since chaired two more such panels. I'll be doing two more this year alone, one at Katsucon 4, and another at Anime Central '98. The Anime Central panel is not yet set, so if you're a writer and would like to be on it, drop me a line!

So, to finally arrive at my point, I've decided to take a break to catch up on some writing. Specifically, to finish the Tenchi Muyo! story Mother's Day that I've been working on for over a year. Also, with my plans to attend two conventions in six weeks, I figured I'd better not push it. I will return with a new column for May, which will be inspired by the happenings at Katsucon and Anime Central.

With that cleared up, let's move on to the topic.