When I was fourteen, I was something of a big deal in the Inheritance Cycle fanfiction.net archives. Somehow, this is only in the lower end of “Top Ten Embarrassing Sentences I’ve Ever Typed.”

Anyway, for most of my teen years, I wrote fanfiction like it was my job, avidly read other people’s work, acted as a beta reader for my friends, and loved every minute of it. I knew all the lingo—remember “lemons” and “Mary-Sues” and “don’t like, don’t read!”?

I was quite fond of “crack fic,” a mid-2000s term for purely funny and ridiculous parody fics—Voldemort and the Death Eaters have a sleepover, Frodo and Sam get zapped into Walmart and have to work there (…wait, that one’s a good idea. Maybe I should fire up my old account. But no, I will not be listing the username), stuff like that. I wrote plenty of serious fanfiction, but I loved the absurdity of crackfic.

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