I started with Zelda. There were quite a few EPIC length (easily 500+k words) Zelda fics featuring teen!Link and various OCs. Even now, they're a bit better than the crap I usually come across (though I'd never try reading them now). I was 11-12 at the time, and secretly awaited their updates. For a long time I forgot about Fanficiton after that, then started up again on a whim.

I would never tell anyone, not only because most people aren't even aware of it (I mean, most of the people I'm around can only name what garbage antivirus software they use) but because it's excessively nerdy. I'd say fanfiction is only a hair above... dungeons and dragons, or going to animecons (strike me with lightning if I ever stoop that low). If I ever told anyone – I'd probably die of embarassment afterward (and summarily throw myself under a rock). Nope, I'm an illiterate bum if that what it takes.

 

Lol, nerd-dom is no negative in my mind. I'd hide under a rock if someone came in to find me watching TV. That is far worse than reading fanfiction.

 

I got into HP fandom because of the amoung of Yu Yu Hakusho/HP crossovers I saw in the YYH section. I wanted to find out what those characters were (the only contact I'd had with HP had been the first movie).

Now I don't read any YYH, like some poster above said, there is a huge dearth of gen.

 

Private for me.
Started out with Eva-R

 

I guess I started reading fanfiction religiously later than all you folk, but got started in a very similar way. So, I had been searching for a copy of HBP before it came out, and ended up finding a torrent of, what I thought at the time was, HBP. I found out after I had read it that it was actually a fic by Melindaleo (who I still maintain as one of the best HP fanfic writers out there, despite my change in tastes). Shit, now I'm getting all nostalgic.

 

^ Pretty much the same as Veri, substituting BarbLP for Melindaleo. Well, along with the mass smut fics abound on LimeWire. Seriously, some of that stuff is crazy - and I found it at 14. Anyone looking for a reason for me being me: here it is. . .

I have no reason to keep HP fanfiction quiet. Maybe from next month onwards, but I have a feeling the women I'm looking to attract will find being 'well-read' sexy :awesome

Honestly, I tried to introduce a couple of friends to fanfiction; had a couple of conversations with the ex about it, but nothing's come of it. It's just another one of my eccentricities, I guess. ..

 

Meh, a friend of mine knows that I tried my hand at writing a Firefly fanfic (which sucked so hard that I went back and deleted it from fireflyfans.net in shame) a few years back, and that I read some. I knew a few girls in high school that would print off sheets upon sheets of Severitus and Harry/Draco slash fics, then giggle and squeal over them at lunch, but, needless to say, I never really talked to them about it all that much. My grandparents proofread my Firefly fic for me. My step-dad knows and reminds me of what a nerd I am every chance he gets (and not in a nice, teasing way either).

Other than that, I'm extremely reluctant to share it with anyone face-to-face. Even with people who are in on the big secret, I avoid talking about it as much as possible. So yeah, I try to keep it as private as possible.

 

I'm too old to be writing fan fiction. At least, that's what most of my peers would say. Plus, as someone else mentioned, fan fiction is considered extremely unprofessional in certain circles. So, I mostly keep it to myself -- it's just my own private hobby.

 

Fair few of my friends know about it; most of them, if they were interested, get pointed to the Denarian Trilogy by me, as I see it as the most "mainstream" of my favourite fics (i.e. violent, action packed, bit of a sex stuff etc) and so its most likely to appeal quickly, if that makes sense.

Had one or two people try to make fun, but when it comes down to it I have about 2000+ regular readers, which is more people than they will ever know in more than a passing sense enjoying (I hope) stuff I've created. So they can suck it.

I'm easily the biggest reader in the group, so I tend to be the one to pass on the update info ("Denarian updated, by the by," etc)

 

I started off with Harry Potter. Can't really remember when. My family knows, because they see me on all the time. My dad is actually the one who got me into it. I mention it to my friends that I know love to read, but that's about it. I'm not really keeping it a secret though.

DLP on the other hand.... My dad knows about the site because he lurks around the library and a few of the other threads. My sister knows too, because she's seen me on and asked what it was. I just told her it was an exclusively Harry Potter fanfiction site. I failed to mention it was exclusive to us sick bastards. I've never told anyone about it without being asked though.

 

I don't go out telling everyone I meet that I read fanfiction. Most poeple see how many books I have and seen how many books I read during my breaks at work and just assume that I read books online. And I got started with DBZ probably 7 or 8 years ago.

 

Private? I don't really advertise the fact, and I'm certainly not afraid to tell people online, but still keep it somewhat quiet if someone else doesn't bring it up. I think the majority of the people I know IRL have no clue that I like fanfiction. Obviously all of my online friends know.

Basically all that other people know is that I live to read and spend inordinate amounts of time on my computer. What can I say? Fanfiction is cheap, I'm broke.

I've been reading fanfiction for about 8 years now.

 

Semi-Public. If someone asks me what I do with my spare time, fanfiction usually pops up. Do they know that he majority of fanfiction these days are slash fics? Hell no, I like my friends.

 

Private for me. My wife knows, as well as my immediate family, but beyond that no one does. I'm sure as hell not ever going to mention it to my friends who really don't read all that much fiction to begin with.

One of my wife's good friends is obsessed with the canon books and has read them like 2 or 3 times each. However since I've read huge amounts of fan fiction, I know significantly more about canon than her. Of course just like everyone else that found out about my obsession with HP fanfiction, she found it weird that I was into it.

Luckily my wife already thought I was a huge dork/nerd before I got into HP fanfiction, so she was prepared when I started reading it all the time.

As for fanfiction itself, I originally started with Stargate SG1 and Halo fanfiction, but then switched almost entirely to HP once I read The Paradigm of Uncertainty by Lori (the quality on that story far exceeded any other FF I had ever read before and exceeded even the books).

 

Definitely public. Half the grade knows and expects me to be reading fanfiction every free minute I have.

I actually have 3 fanfiction friends. Two I met through FF.ent and one a girl in the grade above in my school. There's also a weird girl who writes Twilight PWP, in my class, and used to it aloud at lunch. Strange that they're all female.

I first entered the ff world with Gargoyles fanfiction, six years ago. (A pity that TGS still hasn't updated in the past 5 or so years, though they keep promising that the series is still alive.) I was researching something about Amazon warriors. >.>

 

Private, sort of.

I mean, after getting into HP fanfiction sometime between GoF and OotP I would occasionally share particularly good finds with my brother, and my roommate now knows after asking about the [DLP] Steam tag but that's it. No one else asks what I'm reading and I don't bang on about Harry Potter anyway.

Fanfiction roots-wise, I started on Evangelion fanfiction years (almost a fucking decade, christ.) ago and still read as much Eva as I do HP, though admittedly both have slowed down quite a bit. Or perhaps a increasingly specific set of standards are to blame.

Aside from now being on the lookout for particularly good Terminator:SCC fics (Judge The Sky being the current flavour of the month), I've been pretty static concerning fandoms.

 

For me, the fact that I read fanfiction isn't exactly private - it's come up a few times in conversation - but I don't exactly go around advertising the fact.

Although I'm a lot more private with any fanfiction that I happen to write - I'm already incredibly shy about that, mostly because I know that my writing has several major flaws in it, and when other people read it and don't notice said flaws, I can't help but wondering if they really like it, or if they're just saying that because I'm there friend. Because I know that a couple times, when one of my friends have written something and I've read it, and the writing says things like, "Yes, I wear black clothes and I wear black eyeshadow and I wear black lipstick and nail polish, and dye my hair black and... -insert comments about every possible thing one could have, say, or do to be a stereotypical 'goth' here-," I'll find myself lying through my teeth when I say "It's okay," or "It's fine," because I don't want to hurt their feelings. With fanfiction, though, it's even worse. To some of my friends, 'writing a Harry Potter fanfiction' means 're-writing the Harry Potter books', and no matter how much I try to explain fanfiction to some of them, they just don't get it. So I just don't really talk about it all that much to all but one of my friends (and she's really into fanfiction too).

 

I started reading fanfiction with emule downloaded crappy fiction named Order of the Phoenix... there was a site mentioned... portkey.org good ol' H/Hr times. After that it was ff.net and soon I stumbled upon a link to strange forum known as DLP.

As to the reading habit, I'm not hiding it. Most of my friends know that I read fantasy/fiction and fanfiction on my laptop... Well, most of them think that I am at least weird, so...

 

To the annoyance of my friends, I probably keep it too public. I usually manage to babble some deep and/or horrifying thoughts about bad fanfiction and random videogames when talking about pretty much anything. My parents hate it with the force of a thousands suns, because "I don't read good books anymore". And everytime they see me reading anything on a screen they think it's fanfiction. The truth is the college's library doesn't have anything interesting, and I've already read all the books in our collection that aren't Herman Hesse or Umberto Eco in german. Oh well.

My best friends reads drama Sailor Moon fanfics and curses me for introducing her to this wretched world. One of my college friends like to read steamy Harry/Draco fics and loves the films, so talking about HP with her involves a lot of internal cringing and o rly?s.

...

Holy crap, i just checked the dates of my old aborted fics, and I've been reading fics continuously for almost ten years, most of it HP. Is it sad?


I'd still hate the english language if it weren't for them, though...


Edit: I need to visit the general section more... almost a week! <_<