Too Hot For Listserv: My First Fanfic Experience
That post about fandom history I shared last night reminded me of the story of the first time I ever posted fanfic to the internet.
Now, I’d first written fanfic before I knew the name for it, when I was 12 and we didn’t have the internet. But when I was 18 I got really into online fic for a bunch of different fandoms. Eventually I found my way into Forever Knight fandom. Now, if you have never heard of Forever Knight, I will understand. It was a B-grade cult show even at the time. It was a show about a vampire cop in Toronto. But the fandom was awesome. Just really passionate and community oriented, and that was what made it the first fandom I really interacted with online, rather than just lurking.
So I wrote a fic. It wasn’t much, and looking back is pretty awful. Just a PWP, but a PWP of a rarepair. So at the time, there were two main listservs for the fandom. A listserv, for the kids among us, was an email list where you sent an email to one central address and then everyone who was subscribed to the list got the email. So you would get everyone’s fandom posts in your email inbox. And you’d be subscribed to a BUNCH of these listservs if you were active, so imagine the amount of email you were wading through! Anyway, there was one main list for discussion, with about 2000 people on it, the entire fandom. Then there was one listserv for fanfiction. This had an Adult setting, where if you posted something 18+ in nature, you would post to the Adult tag which was opt-in only for people affirming they were over 18.
So I wrote my porn and posted it to the Adult part of the fanfiction listserv. Now, at the time, I had just moved across the country and into a new place. I was using dial-up internet, since you could only really get cable internet if you were on campus or paid a BUNCH of money to have it installed. And for some reason my dial-up wasn’t working right. I had internet to post the fic, but then it stopped working and I couldn’t connect to see any reactions to it!! The HORROR!
So three days later, desperate for feedback, I went to the local library in downtown Houston to check my email. Now, this wasn’t gmail or hotmail or anything, this was my old universities email address I was using, so I was signing into their webmail page, which sucked. So I’m standing up (for some reason their public computers didn’t have chairs), right in the middle of the library, checking my email for replies to my porn fic, trying to block people’s views of my screen, right?
And I have a bunch of emailed responses to my fic. (Keep in mind, these people had to email me DIRECTLY to reply. There was no way to comment on fic. Generally, in those days, you didn’t get comments. People posted fic to webpages and if you wanted you could email them, but mostly you didn’t. This was a little different because it was a listserv, and a small community, who kinda knew me a little.) So I got a smattering of positive comments.
But I also got a reply from the moderator of the listserv. A reply which said that my fic was “too hardcore” and “too explicit” for their server. Even for the Adult list! And that in the future, before I posted any other fic, I would need to submit it to them to have it approved.
I nearly died. My face went bright red and I spluttered, there in the public library. What the hell? My fic? I’d read plenty of things that were more explicit than mine. How DARE she?
What was the content that was too controversial? A m/f pairing with 100% vanilla sex. Umm, but according to this person, something about the way I wrote it was just too DIRTY. (I suspect now it was probably using works like cock instead of “manhood” or something.)
So I did the logical thing, which was close my email, unsubscribe from all the fandom listservs and ghost the fandom entirely.
As you do.
Of course, when I’d posted the fic, I’d given the standard permission for my fic to be archived on the Fandom Fanfiction Archive fkfanfic.net. Every story in the fandom was saved there. But what I didn’t expect was that it would be archived with the header of my email still attached, showing my university email address, and my Legal Name.
So that’s how my first fanfic ever got me banned from an adult fanfiction listserv for being too porny AND became the top result when you googled my name for a good decade after.
