Stephen Zacharus:
Well. I finished my first fanfic, "Wrath of the Goddess," in about September or October of 1999. I submitted it to The Sonic Foundation and a few other sites, but I was disappointed with the lack of feedback I received. I discovered FanFiction.Net when I did a search-engine sweep for fanfiction sites. I was intrigued by the review system and the upload-it-yourself nature of the site. At the time, it wasn't NEARLY as popular as it is today. Anyway, I signed up for an account and uploaded "Wrath of the Goddess" and waited patiently for reviews. They never came. Which was a little discouraging. This was in late December 1999, by the way. I remember this, because I uploaded it when I was bored at my aunt's house during New Year's eve. Anyway, I developed this sneaky habit of... shall we say "re-releasing" stories that had been previously published if I was unhappy with the number of reviews I got. Yes, I was that pathetic back then. Let's see, in 1999, I would have been 15. Enough said. I'd just started high school.
Sean Catlett:
So you're saying you didn't rise like a Pheonix out of the ashes and you were immediately catapulted into fanfiction stardom?
Stephen Zacharus:
No. Hehe. Nicely put.
Sean Catlett:
But misspelled, I know. Continue.
Stephen Zacharus:
Yeah, when I originally posted "Wrath," for example, I uploaded it as one chapter. I later discovered that you could divide stories into multiple files for each chapter on the server. At the time I'd received ONE review. But it was from an author I respected (a girl by the name of Eclipse, who wrote an awesome story about Geoffrey's treachery that would inspire me to write "Betrayal is a Beautiful Game" years later), so it was cool. I guess I had two reviews, technically, if you count the anonymous review that I posted myself.
Sean Catlett:
....!
Stephen Zacharus:
"You're the next Drazen!" or something to that effect. I was hoping it would encourage people to read it. Funny to look back on. I was so pathetic.
Sean Catlett:
God I thought I knew you...
Stephen Zacharus:
Hehehe. Hey, I only did that once! Just once!
Sean Catlett:
And Ed Gein only killed like four people! You actually comparing the two?
Stephen Zacharus:
Well... I was 15!!!!!
Sean Catlett:
Grrr. So, Wrath is posted under one long chapter. What happened next?
Stephen Zacharus:
So, yeah. I later found out that "updated" stories appeared at the top of the heap. New chapters constituted an "update," so I merely separated that one long chapter into three (which was better, since there were three parts anyway) and the story appeared at the top again. Sadly, I gained no additional reviews. I would later discover that this was not because people didn't notice the story, but because it sucked ass. I made one final attempt to be noticed by attaching a "Timeline" chapter to the end, making it four chapters on the server but only three of those were actually the story. I would use the Timeline trick again for several subsequent stories, but I finally gave up.
Sean Catlett:
And what was on this... "Timeline"?
Stephen Zacharus:
On the Timeline, I'd list stories by other authors which fit into the fanfiction "universe" upon which I based my own. I was inspired to write "Wrath" because, in reading DeLaCroix's "Starship Down" series, I noticed frequent references to a Doomsday Project, but nothing absolutely concrete. Leading me to theorize (correctly) that it was an event which took place in the actual series rather than simply in fanfiction. My grand idea was to create an extended version of that episode which fit perfectly into the universe established by DeLaCroix's series and similar stories by Drazen and Pistone. Hence the Jamaican Knuckles and the inclusion of Packbell and Bookshire. I thought it was a pretty neat idea at the time, but it's sort of stupid now and it's one of my least favorite stories. But hey, you have to start somewhere.
Sean Catlett:
"Every building has a bottom floor."
Stephen Zacharus:
I wasn't through trying to get attention, though. Several months after releasing (and re-releasing) "Wrath," I wrote a series of vignettes which I claimed to be "missing" chapters from "Wrath" that I omitted from the final draft. "Deleted scenes," you could say. Except they weren't deleted, I wrote them after I published the story and posted them under the title "Perspectives." In 2001, I removed "Perspectives" from my FanFiction.Net page and pasted the chapters into a sort of "director's cut" version of "Wrath." Did I mention that it SUCKS? I hate that fucking story.
Sean Catlett:
I stopped reading it after I found out that the anonymous user was full of shit. Next Dan Drazen my ass.
Continue to Part Five
