The year was 2000. I was 17 years old, and living in Peoria, Arizona with my Dad, stepmom, stepbrother, and little brother. Back then, a dial-up connection was the status quo for connecting to the Internet. Since I was completely obsessed with La Femme Nikita on the USA Network, it seemed only natural to log on to the Internet and hunt for pictures and news on the series. In doing so, though, I discovered fan fiction. Boy did I ever!

Every chance I got, I would fill those little 3.5 inch floppy disks full of La Femme Nikita fanfic. If someone was using the phone (or hogging the Internet) at home, I could always go up to the public library, use a computer there, and find more fanfic sites to find stories to copy and paste into text files that I’d save onto one of my disks. That ensured easily hours worth of reading when I got home later.

It’s kind of crazy to think that a standard 3.5 inch floppy disk only held 1.44 MB worth of data. If you were only storing long text files full of fanfic, that went pretty far!

The idea for this post came up as a result of me and my youngest daughter talking about fanfic. She reads fanfic. I still read fanfic too (albeit not for La Femme Nikita. Castle and Clawen are much more my speed these days.)

I guess I just wanted one of those ‘BACK IN MY DAYYY…’ sort of moments with her, and then I got to thinking about it. Wow. I’ve been reading fanfic off and on for around 26 years. O.O

I realize I’m in my 40s now (which I’m sure people older than me would consider young still), but I’m not exactly a spring chicken anymore. Thinking about it that way made me feel old.

It was bad enough that I looked at my old profile for fanfiction.net and discovered that the last update to what was written there was from 2008. I was 26 years old at the time, and man did it ever show. Talk about embarrassing!