This won't let me sleep until I write it down. So...
I don't know where this came from, but if I don't write it down and post it for the world to see then I won't be able to sleep. If you don't read this I won't blame you, though if you do, randomly, then let me know.
My first foray into fan fiction was with Sailor Moon, in like fourth grade, when a friend and I started writing fic without knowing what we were doing. I don't have a clue what it was about, but that stayed with me for a long time. My character name became my screen name when we got the internet, and I still use it for things. My character's symbol turned out to be a celtic knot. I may or may not have that knot tattooed somewhere on my body <.< >.>...
After that nothing happened for a while, then I discovered Stargate, and somehow stumbled into Jack/Daniel fic. I don't know how, or why, or when, but it happened. This was probably in middle school, when I discovered what being gay was, and how awesome it could be. The first X-men movie came put when I was in middle school as well, and I briefly delved into Cyclops/Wolverine. Still, though, it was never a huge thing.
High school. I still read Stargate fic every once in a while. Around the time I graduated I read a few Eureka fics, though never really got into it until later, and maybe a few Enterprise fics, though more on those two later. It was difficult to read fic because I shared a computer with my parents, and we had AOL, so there was none of the awesome multi-tab browsing that I rely on nowadays. Actually, in my freshman year, another one of my friends and I wrote a Xanth/LOTR crossover, that was nothing if not pure crack. It was awesome, I wish we could have finished it. It was about Legolas losing his rubber ducky while taking a bath in Galadriel's mirror, and the fellowship going on a magical quest to Xanth to find it. We stopped writing it when we got to Waffle Night, in which everyone got seriously inebriated and shenanigans happened. Funnily, after that, that group of friends and I got together every Thursday and went to IHOP for waffles. For the most part, however, I was too busy to really spend time on reading fic. I was a musical prodigy and that requires work.
College. I had no free time at all for the first year, but still read a little fic here and there. I discovered Area 52, and how much I loved Daniel/Cameron more than Jack/Daniel (Jack left, and I never really forgave him for that...). I got more into Enterprise and Eureka. I got a Blackberry so I could read fic whenever I wanted. I read all of the Archer/Tucker I could find, and all of the Carter/Stark I could find (mind you, this was before Carter had hallucinations about Stark sunbathing. I wanted to get into SGA, but didn't really like McKay very much and Area 52 didn't have a Sheppard/Lorne option. In fact, it still didn't the last time I checked it... Anyway, then I kinda broke my thumb and had to stop being a musician, as I could no longer practice. I could also no longer play video games, and all of the sudden I had way more free time than I knew what to do with. Being a huge CSI fan, I rediscovered fan fiction after a particularly slashy scene in season nine where Nick was in a closet getting uncomfortable while Greg and Riley talked about sex. Nick/Greg is the most popular paring in that fandom, and when I had tried to delve into it earlier I didn't like Greg, and never really read anything because it was always Nick/Greg. All of the sudden I was constantly reading 'The Love' fic, I read all of the long stuff on fanfiction.net and then read everything that was completed on What Makes the Desert Beautiful, you know, before it got stupid. My best friend was into it as well, and I had someone to squee with. Then I ran out of CSI fic, so I turned to Stargate again, because there was a lot of it out there. I discovered that I liked MPreg, and searching for that on Area 52 helped me get into McShep. Then I found the Crossroads, which is pretty much the most awesome idea ever, and I really wish that other fandoms would have something similar.
The Crossroads introduced me to LJ, which I didn't get at first. Eventually I found big bangs and how awesomely the LJ system is for tagging stuff and fic in general. SGA had so much fic that I spent even more time reading it. At one point I got Netflix and watched Torchwood because a lot of the authors that I liked in the CSI fandom also like Torchwood, then I got into that fandom. That is another thing that started when I injured my thumb, or at least around that time. I binge TV. That summer I was doing summer school and working, but had a lot of free time that I didn't really know what to do with, so one of my friends introduced me to Sidereel and the binging started. I started with House, then I did anime, then I tried Nip/Tuck, but I could never find good links. Then ,y parents bought me all of CSI for Christmas, which didn't help to slow down the CSI binge that happened, and then my friend loaned me Farscape, and so on and so forth.
CSI and SGA kept me pretty occupied until my third year of college, which was when I started on Torchwood, but that was also when I finally got LJ. I needed to write a paper on popular culture adaptations of folklore, and decided what better than to do fairy tale fusions in fan fiction. So I got LJ and used the SGA genre community and then it got really bad, as I could follow people, and it would email me whenever they posted anything (and I would get it on my blackberry instantly), and I had moved home, so my half hour commute with friends to school became a two hour commute alone with my blackberry. I also got a job that I did at home, and was fast enough at that I only needed to work for five minutes out of fifteen to be as fast as my coworkers, so I read fic then. It was actually kinda scary for a while. Also, I got H1N1 and missed most of school.
It was around this time that I realized that the only reason that I read McShep was that it was well written. I still didn't really like McKay and tended to really only read AUs, but it was okay, because there was John/Cam and Lorne/Sheppard, and even Lorne/Granger (which prompted a Numb3rs binge) and there was Janto and my flist had a lot of Merlin on it, so I watched Merlin and fell in love with that, and so on. At one point there were a few crossovers with Highlander, so I started watching that and tried to find fic for it when I realized that that fandom is, essentially and ironically, dead, so I gave up, because I didn't really like it.
Then this year started and I didn't know what to do. I was kinda ficced out. I was really in the mood for CSI, because that was really my first and my favorite, but there hans't been good Nick/Greg fic in a long time. It has been over a year since I actually read anything, but the show started getting terrible and none of my favorite authors were writing, and I was angry about Torchwood, and my favorite John/Cam authors started writing in Hawaii Five-0 which I wasn't watching, and my favorite Janto authors basically stopped writing, I couldn't read McShep anymore. Add to that that my commute became five hours because Denver's public transportation system, while being awesome, has some stupid scheduling crap, and I was only taking one class because I had technically already graduated, and I didn't have much to do. I got into Sherlock, and that held my interest for a while, but it wasn't the same as it had been. John/Cam is awesome, but not many people write it so it doesn't update quickly,and I ran out of that.
I got a new phone for Christmas that had a Kindle app, so I got a bunch of ebooks, but those killed my bank account and were generally short and not well written (I consider a good fic to be about 100k words, and often don't read stuff less than 20k unless I like the author). Then I started binging Queer as Folk, which made me strangely productive and I started writing a lot. I guess I should mention that I dropped out of my class in late October and didn't get a job, so I had nothing but free time. After my productive streak wore off I discovered Supernatural.
Now, I had flirted with this fandom since one of my favorite authors put the Winchesters on an SG team in an awesome John/Cam fic. It took me a long time to actually start watching it, and when I did I didn't really like it. Season 1 just didn't do it for me, each episode was basically a mini horror movie and I don't like horror movies. I wanted to see Castiel, as I had heard that Dean/Cas was a good pairing, and I didn't realize that he didn't show up until season 3. One of the writers that I follow hosted a ficathon and someone had a Dean/Cas drabble and I read it and fell in love. So I skipped straight to season four and wow, I had to discover a way to get over Megavideo's stupid limits, and I did, and basically watched the last three seasons (at least as far as I could) in about two weeks. After that it was easier to watch the first three seasons, which I did in another two weeks. Then I started reading the fic. I have barely scratched the surface, and I have read at least a million words (most likely many more) since around the time of The French Mistake. I thought the SGA fandom had a lot of crack, but in SPN it is practically canon. I got burnt out pretty fast on SPN, not to the point of hating it, but to where I needed to take a break.
Then I spent a week watching H50 and I love that show. I am not as into the fandom as I would like to be, but I read a little here and there. It is enough to keep me from hating SPN, so that is good. It is just hard with such a young fandom because I don;t know who is good and who isn't when it comes to writers, and there aren't really a lot of long fics out there. Hopefully over the summer I will figure that out, but I am okay until then. Warehouse 13 is getting another attractive male lead, so hopefully there will finally be some good slash there.
I have done other things during this time. I binged Buffy, True Blood, Being Human and New Who, as well as some Old Who, but I really don't recommend that. I hate Five now. I binged shows like Firefly, Bones, Psych and others with my family. I also got into grad school and did some productive things.
Like I said I really don't know why I got the urge to write all of this down, let alone post it, but there it is. What got you into fandom?