on the internet the past never dies

On the internet, the past never dies, it just gets archived.

This is a tribute to the waybackmachine and a reflection on my life writing fiction.

I am a writer. I have always been a writer. The depth and breadth of my writings astounds me.

A random chance link sent me on an archival expedition to see what of my past writings organized on handmade (ancient self-coded HTML) websites (webhosting companies that no longer exist like xoom and geocities) remained available on the internet.

It made me realize that I have been sharing my writing forever. I found a Xena work which I first posted in August 1997. I even found stories I had written before the 1990s but which I had added to my sites as a way to practice my nascent web building skills.

I found my an entire cache of Star Trek: Next Generation fanfiction (I was a die-hard Picard/Crusher fan) and all my (thought lost) Star Trek: Voyager music videos and manipulated graphics celebrating a Janeway/Seven relationship.

I found one-off little original stories that, even now, I wonder at and marvel how my muse works. Stories with mindgames, rooted in reality, but featuring galactic thieves, or fantasy and magic. There are themes and threads and isolated ideas I never explored again but they are there in these older writings with thousands upon thousands of words.

There are tiny fics (what today might be called ‘flash fiction’) which I wrote for fandom challenges in small, but dedicated, groups of fans, like KissMeKate, the J7 Board, and even the roleplaying stories I wrote as a member of The Center for Xena Studies.

I wrote full-length scripts for Next Generation and Xena. It is only because of the internet that these stories exist in any form.

Thank you to the internet waybackmachine for this walk down my Memory Lane.