@wings4dreams: I know its been said by many already but I wanted to let you know that as sad as it is, I know what it's like to be hella busy, so we can certainly wait, especially if there is a glimmer of hope that we can catch on to... All good things come with time and that includes an update from you... and one for ALl Aboard too
How the fanfic thing all started for me... I think it would have been maybe 5 yrs ago that I got completely immersed in Buffy fanfic (Willow/Tara stuff seeing the forum I was on was completely exclusive to those two) and it was probably about 50/50 perv/non-perv... There was some crazy kinky stuff going on... so femslash was where it all started
I wrote like a paragraph of a fic of those two once, but was still lazy to do anymore... it was a good paragraph though
Then came something a little different... I was/am a massive tennis fan, I think it may have been a bigger fandom than H!P has been so far although H!P has almost completely replaced it now (which kinda caused a loss of boyfriend and some friends), I still get into it sometimes. Anyway, I found one person who did write fanfic of two of my fave players and although it wasn't smutty at all, it was always a big blob of fluffy goodness (Marat Safin & Daniela Hantuchova for anyone who knows about tennis)... It was really good to read and I never once thought of the fact that they were real people, which I guess kinda makes me evil in a way
But because of that, when I got into H!P fanfic the fact the were real people I was ready about really didn't bother me, but since it was brought up here before, I do think/worry about it more now, lol.
I have dipped my toes into other random fandom fics like WonderBang, Twilight series and Harry Potter (unwillingly seeing I hate that) but never could get into them at all.
As for what I look for in a fic... basically I just wanna be able to feel it... Whether it makes me feel sad, happy, loved, scared, giddy,
or even excited *cough* etc, I don't care as long as I can feel IT, the story! I do read some fics that don't make me feel like that, and enjoy them, but they just then aren't memorable... I know I REALLY like a fic when i re-read lines, paragraphs even, over and over again, just coz I am enjoying so much... some current writers make me do that every time I read something of their's, and others on occasion do... Really, as long as you do at least one thing really really well in ur writing (dialogue, detail, characterization etc) then I'm easy to please