Thoughts About My Fanfic Writing Anniversary

It was two-years ago this month that I wrote my first fan-fiction story, written sitting at my desktop computer while my children played blocks and Little People on the floor behind me. In August, 2011, I did not know that fan-fiction existed, I was writing simply because I'd spent the summer re-reading the books and found myself reading the last couple chapters of Deathly Hallows again and again (already I was completely ignoring the Epilogue) trying to read between the lines and find more answers than the words on the pages were providing. I contemplated ordering the UK books to see if they provided more closure, but I knew they wouldn't, the answers weren't there.

At the playground, driving to school and work, I started composing what I thought happened next. When these thoughts became jumbled, I scribbled them down on an envelope in my purse. When I lost the envelope, I sat down at my computer and wrote out my thoughts, but then I started adding dialogue, and it started to build. My little bit of closure grew to be 22,000 words, and I was immensely proud of it, because it put a neat little bow to the seven books, and of course reflected what I wanted to see happen.

Still, I was embarrassed, I'd just spent two or three weeks writing a conclusion to someone else's story, and I couldn't really justify why. In a rare bit of honesty I confessed doing this to a virtual friend (the only kind I have) and she typed back: Oh, you wrote a fan-fic. I gave a virtual nod and immediately went to Google and searched fan-fic and got over six million hits as a return.

This was my first clue that the world was not flat.

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