#it also got abandoned and every now and then i get emails from fanfiction.net of people finding it and wanting an update

[voidscarredadjudicator]

Just wanted to say thanks for writing your fic! It has inspired me to starting writing my own Splatoon fic (albeit this one is a bit of a crossover.) I hope you keep doing what you love. :)

Crossover or not, it's honestly amazing to hear that I've inspired anyone in any capacity! I'd love to see it whenever it's finished!

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with bugs

bugs has 40 stories at Gossamer. They mostly focus on Mulder and Scully, but there are also some goodies featuring Reyes and Doggett. I’ve recced some of my favorites of her fics here before, including The Link. She also co-ran WhyIncision, a fun, smart X-Files mailing list that dissected fics like a book club. Big thanks to bugs for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

Not really. While I was still in high school, I started watching the then 20 year old OG Star Trek and became a Trekkie of a sort. Starlog magazine, James Blish novels and the other novelizations, and while I was working as a library page, I found fanfiction one day among the periodicals.  Who knows how fanfiction ended up as part of a library's materials, but there it was, this tattered mimeographed collection. The fic that had the most impact on me was one where Nurse Chapel wrestled a giant alien snake to save Spock's life.

So when I got into XF, one of the first things I did was look for fanfic, knowing somewhere out there, Scully was wrestling a big snake for Mulder.

That experience showed me the power of fandom, that even without the internet, how the second generation of Trekkies joined the original group to advocate for the franchise to be revived. I remember sitting in the theater for that first awful Star Trek movie, choked up with what we'd done.

Tragic backstory way to say, no I'm not surprised that a well-produced show like XF would beget future generations of fans, and that they'd be chewing their way through the fanfic archives still being maintained.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

I'm so grateful to the fandom. Literally formed the life I have today through the confidence it gave me. Many of my friends to this day are 'pocket friends' from the various fandoms I've been in, and the longest friendships were formed in XF. I learned how to write, both technically and finding my voice. I learned how to think analytically, more than any college courses.

The two most important things I took away were, write for yourself first and always, and shit ain't that damn important. In the end, it's a TV show.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

YIKES.  I came in at the Fight the Future summer hiatus, so the waning days of ATXC, then we moved to mailing lists, right?  Yahoo Groups was in there somewhere. Finally message boards. Live Journal rose up at the end of the run which began to fragment the fandom even before the show ended, along with the migration off our individual websites to Archive of Our Own, fanfiction.net and such. We went from group discussion platforms to 'come look at my blog for my thoughts'. It was different and I didn't particularly like it, but in the end, when I came back to fandom for a new show....I had to get a Live Journal. That's the most interesting part of fandom, that a platform doesn't mold a fandom; we use the platform and when it's no longer useful to us, we abandon it en mass.

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

I've touched on that a bit, but to elaborate, I'm glad I started in the XF fandom. It had such high standards and I hope that I maintain those standards for myself to this day. These days, I don't usually have a beta reader, but that took a couple hundred posted fics to get to that point.

Having seen the same exact flamewars and divides and squabbles over and over, seen how the taste of 'fame' can drive someone to be rather unpleasant, has given me a much more 'whatever' attitude. It's sort of comforting when joining a new fandom to know what's going to happen next in its natural progression.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

There's a meme "I have a type," and XF definitely had that type, but it just took me a while to get there. I was away at college then working on the road when the show started, and wasn't home on Friday nights most of the year. My mother has always been a big sci-fi fan, so she actually was watching before me. I don't like scary things, and would leave the room if it was on when I'd visit her. I was home for Christmas when Christmas Carol/Emily aired and I remember standing tentatively just inside the room so I could flee if necessary, and watched Scully go through the wringer, and ranting, "What the hell is this? Why are they putting that poor woman through this!?" I also saw how the show was doing the big ship tease, and I was like, uh, I don't have time for this. Even by my 20's, I'd been done wrong by so many shows that I'd become bitter. But the first film trailers suggested they were actually going from UST to RST, so I figured I could give 2 hours of my time for that.  And yeah...but I was hooked, and WENT TO BLOCKBUSTER AND RENTED THE VHS TAPES TO CATCH UP....this interview is making me feel very old.

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I've always been a shipper and have no shame in that, as I think forming and maintaining a relationship is the most conflict-ridden enterprise humans can attempt, and thus is the most challenging thing to write about. Like many fanfic writers, I'd 'told stories in my head' ever since I can remember about the characters from books, shows and movies. It was just a matter of then writing it down for the first time.

After I was sucked into the show and it was still the summer hiatus, I got on my first computer, dialed up that screeching modem, and went on Netscape to search for that fanfic I knew had to be out there from my Trek experience a decade ago. Like many people, after inhaling much of the delicious fics out there, I decided I can do that. I'm someone who's very methodical on my approach to something new, so I studied what worked/what didn't, the expected formatting, got a sense of the culture I was entering, acquired a critical beta reader, so when I actually submitted the first chapter to AXTC, I was calm and confident.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

I watch from the sidelines, with a vague little smile on my lips.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

Yes, I have. Battlestar Galactica had a lot of Philes, but it was still a big step away from the very organized fandom in X-Files. Plus, with so many characters, there could be lots of little groups focused on their favorites. Same in the Downton Abbey fandom. Just a different dynamic.

On the other end of the spectrum, one of my most popular fics is in the Silence of the Lambs fandom which I've never been involved with any other fans or their fandom, if it exists. It just sits out there on fanfiction.net and chugs along with the reads. My current fandom is The Doctor Blake Mysteries which is tiny but mighty--the saying is, we're six people and a shoelace. It's shown me that it's not the size, not the 'fame' possible, but the passion that makes a fandom.

Sadly, at least at this time, I don't think there will ever be an experience like The X-Files heyday. It was such a golden moment of the rise of internet and home computer use by the general public, a large generation of educated women having the time to participate in fandom, and there wasn't the amount of 'noise' that is distracting us all now. I'm so glad that you're doing this exercise to record our thoughts. We've already lost so many of the OG folks. My first beta, Janet Caires-Lesgold; Trixie, way too young; Shari, also too young; Brandon D Ray, leaving his family too soon; and many more.

(Posted by Lilydale on March 9, 2021)

[thedrakontomes]

Quizilla

Quizilla was an online community featuring user-generated content from teen authors. Much of its content was quiz fic and reader inserts.

 logo from website: "Penny the Pencil Monster"

"Quizilla was first released into the wild on August 4th, 2002." [2]  

When fans began to post   their fanfic at Quizilla in the form of chapters, the site added a section for fiction.

In September 2014, Quizilla announced it was shutting down on October 1.

A similar site is Quotev.

What Was Quizilla?

From its website in 2005:

Quizilla is a place to imagine, create and share great content. It started out, as the name suggests, as a place to make, take and share the results of quizzes. In its over 3 year life, it has grown beyond just quizzes. It now is a leading home on the Web for stories, poems and other user generated content. Whether you want to create, take and share quizzes, a personal journal, write poems, stories, create and share games and more. Quizilla has it all. It represents and embodies the heartbeat of today's teen spirit. [3]

The Beginning: An Announcement

Its creator announced his site on August 4, 2002:

What a concept.

A September 2, 2002 post:

Few things are more gratifying than watching HTTP_REFERER logs run past with tail(1). It's quit a cool thought to be sitting here and having people use something I made. And they keep using it, so they must actually *like* it. Wow.

From the FAQ page in 2005:

Where did you get the idea for Quizilla? The ides for Quizilla came to me when I was looking at ideas for expressing complex data structures in XML. I was mulling around the idea of a standardized format for quizzes and other things and I decided to make some CGI code to automate the idea for me. Then I decided to build more complex display layers around that core, and then I added user accounts, messages and everything else you see now. [6]

Some Stats

2003: A year after its launch, Quizilla had over 330,000 users with above 9 Million pageloads a day and more than 50 Million images used on the site.  [7]

September 2005: It has 40 servers.  [8]

2005: "On an average weekday Quizilla serves nearly 3.0 million pages, most of these involving CGI code and database access. This figure does not include images, which can often surpass 10 million daily... If you go to the homepage of Quizilla.com, you will see some basic stats in the center blue bar at the top of the page. On most days over 1,000,000 quizzes are taken, 5,000 new quizzes are created and up to 2,000 people join the site as new members."  [9]

2007:  Some forum stats from an unknown month in 2007: threads: 47,098, posts: 4,888,270, members: 184,705,active Members: 1,381, most users ever online was 673 on November 11, 2006

Follow the Money

Regarding costs and advertising:

All Internet advertising is evil, and you're just doing this to make money off the work of others! Some people think that, and maybe they would even be right to think that from a cursory perspective. People think that because they got 10 MB of free web space with their dial-up accounts that every Web site in the world should be free because theirs is. However, the unpleasant truth is that a site of any large size costs money to run, money to maintain, and money to expand.

Also see this 2007 post and comments: A look at some fandom based money numbers; archive link, partly bouncy, June 25, 2007

Bought Out and Changed

On October 16, 2006, Viacom's MTV Networks (Teen Nick) announced it had bought Quizilla for an undisclosed sum of money. [11]

After selling to TeenNick the site went from a free writing site to a PG rated site. Due to the sudden changes, a lot of the users' work was deleted, which caused a large number of people to abandon the site.

In 2014, Nielsen wrote about this:

I found out about this about a month ago via Twitter and I’ve been meaning to write something about it but could never find the right words. I hadn’t been involved with the day-to-day operation since middle/late 2009; when the economy tanked, Viacom laid off or reassigned all staff Quizilla developers. They didn’t lay me off since I was a contract employee with no guaranteed hours, but they basically said they weren’t going to give me any more work to do. As the site went to hell I tried to keep up with the dwindling number of people I still knew inside Viacom/MTV Networks. At first they had one sysadmin and a couple of "community managers” still maintaining the site. Then they dropped the sysadmin and went to one community manager with some interns. The last time I reached my fingers in, Q2 2014, I was told all that was left was someone’s AA answering the support email part-time. I didn’t expect them to axe it, actually. It was still bringing in enough page-views to turn a profit (I assume), especially since they basically had no staff. But there may have other been factors at play we don't know about, like potential liability. I haven’t heard from anyone as to why it was killed specifically. I’m sad it’s gone, but it in a big way it had died years ago but just hadn’t stopped moving. I've tried to restart/reimagine the site at least 5 times since 2009, but my own faults have smothered all my attempts all in the cradle.

Regarding the Citrus Content

A fan in 2014 asked a Reddit forum:

I wonder if teenage girls new to fan fiction know that term, or if it's specific to people who discovered fan fiction on sites like Quizilla and fanfiction.net that technically forbid pornographic scenes so teens came up with terms like lemons to get around the filters but let others know what was going down in their fanfic. [14]

xunker/Nielsen replied:

No bones about it, Quizilla had a problem with that kind of content. I dutifully removed it when it was reported or automatically flagged, but if nobody reported it or they used words I didn't know about, well.. let's just say that I, 24 years old at the time, was regularly being outsmarted by 14-year-olds. I think I learned what it meant when someone sent me a message asking me to "please get rid of all these lemon stories!" Thankfully, when I naively asked them what they didn't like about that particular citrus fruit they explained it all to me. Thus, an arms race started: when I started automatically flagging quizzes if the title contained "lemon", they switched to "L3m0n". Then to "nomel", "lemonade", "limon", "lémón" and a dozen others I can't remember anymore.

Why Was This Format Popular for Fanworks?

In 2014, a fan at

Reddit

asked:

To this day I still don't understand why people would write fanfiction on a site whose specific purpose is quizzes when there are fanfiction-specific sites around! Why would you want your fanfiction cluttered up with question numbers and checkboxes and submit buttons? When it wasn't even a choose your own adventure story? [16]

xunker, the site's creator, replied:

However, that being said, they're one of the biggest reasons Quizilla stayed around for as long as it did. Quizzes were fun, and people would spend hours taking them but not many people wanted to spend the time to make a really good quiz. But stories... people would gladly spend weeks writing stories and building their little worlds. Part of me thinks that the users didn't really understand the quiz mechanism and so they thought it was a choose-your-own-adventure-type thing but it really wasn't. Or maybe they did, but just in a different way that I don't realize. A big reason, in the beginning, was the laissez-faire attitude toward customization. Early on, the users figured out how to put CSS and JS in to quizzes and the system fully accepted it, unlike many other user-generated-content sites at the time.

Penny the Pencil Monster!

Comments by Nielsen:

From the site's FAQ, around 2003 and again, in 2005: "That logo, the No. 2 with green arms and legs, is "Penny" the Quizilla pencil monster. When the site first launched I needed a logo to identify the site quickly, but I have no artistic skill when it comes to drawing. Instead, I loaded up a graphics program and clicked out a peculiar little image dot by dot in super zoom mode. It's not very good, but I've grown attached to it."  [18]

From Nielsen's online journal, January 2, 2008:  "Big things are happening at the old Quizilla site, most of which are really due and I'm excited for, though with this new message posted there are more than a few complaints. My favourites? Look for all the people complaining about the loss of the Pencil Monster.. the logo I did in 20 minutes with the Gimp oh so long ago."  -- The Pencil is mightier.. - xunker, Archived version </ref>

Comments by fans:

"Whoever created Penny the pencil monster was a genius." [19]

"I pretty much blame the way I grew up on this little monster..." [20]

a fan commemorates "Penny the Pencil Monster" -- "If you remember the old days on quizilla then this is a familiar mascot that they should not have gotten rid of which is by far one of the best mascots ever." [21]

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Sheryl Martin

Sheryl Martin (aka Sheryl Nantus) joined the online X-Files community very early on in the run of the series. She has 229 stories at Gossamer, some of which are also at fanfiction.net, where her X-Files story Little Helper is the first story ever at the site! She's well known for her Dragon series (at Gossamer) posted from 1995 to 2000. I've recced her story Family Matters here before and have other favorites too, like The Game. Big thanks to Sheryl for doing this interview.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

Well... I met my husband through it, so I'll never say a bad word about it! For those who don't know - when I originally started posting fanfiction, it was on the Usenet group alt.tv.x-files.creative newsgroup - and you could only post small segments at a time. I got a few emails back, fan mail from readers who enjoyed my writing.

One of them was from a lovely young man who really enjoyed my stories, and Jackie St. George - an original character I made up. (Yes, classic Mary Sue, but different in that she did NOT want to hook up with anyone!) I answered him back, as a good author should, and he wrote back and... We've been together since 1993 and married for over 20 years, so I'd say I'm pretty happy with the fandom experience. ;)

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

I practically lived on ATXC and Usenet - I was running on a cheap Mac, using the Toronto Freenet to zip in, grab email and post, then duck out. I was dirt poor - no AOL for me, no university email or web page! It's hard to imagine, but back then it was hard to get online if you didn't have money. The Toronto Freenet gave a free, easy way to pick up email and get online - but only for a short amount of time. When a generous fan asked if they could put up a Geocities page for my fanfic, I was thrilled - there was NO way I could have done that.

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

A husband! And a chance to cut my writing chops on creating stories and characters without fear. The fandom was fantastic in giving feedback on what they liked and didn't like, letting me improve my writing skill with each story.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

Dana Scully. A tough, inspirational woman who took no guff. She stood her ground when many people, I think, would have broken and either sold Mulder out or abandoned him. Damned inspirational.

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I wanted more than what I saw on the show - I imagined what would happen after the episode ended, what they'd be doing or saying. Or filing paperwork... ;)

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

I still get fan letters every now and then from readers - I'm still enjoying the show in various ways, the videos and the recent "revival".

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

I wrote fanfiction for Stargate SG-1 among others - my most recent being for The Orville and Agents of SHIELD - but XF has always been my first love. I've never engaged with fandom as much, I think, as with XF - which is odd, considering we were at the start of the social media craze.

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

I've got so many... The Widow from Into the Badlands, Rita Farr from Doom Patrol (the new series), Sara Lance from Legends of Tomorrow... I love seeing strong women on the screen, doing what women do without throwing it all away for a man's approval.

Yeah, I'm like that.

;)

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

We've got so much XF in the house that I can't! Books, action figures... *laughs* And I follow GA online, so they're never too far from my mind. We still make references back to shows when we see something on the television. ;)

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

Not really - I'm too busy doing original fiction and reading original fiction, sorry. But I do dip over to AO3 every now and then to get inspired with some random fanfic from the shows I'm enjoying.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

Jeepers... it's been years... I loved Cincoflex's stories, but can't bring a title to mind. And Paula Graves, may she rest in peace. We chatted a bit not long before her passing. [Lilydale note: Paula Graves is Anne Haynes.] Heartbreaking to lose her at such a young age. :(

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

I do still love, despite all the bad writing, the Dragon series. They're part of what let me become a better writer, with all the practice.

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

I doubt it. But never say never...

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

The occasional one, as I said above - The Orville, AoS. But I put my energy into original fiction, as you can see - over twenty books published online, from various publishers.

Where do you get ideas for stories?

Anywhere and nowhere. Usually just sitting and staring into space until something tweats at me, begins to whisper in my ear...

What's the story behind your pen name?

Don't have one.

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

Positive - more so from my mother, who noted I found a husband through it. *laughs* Some of them still don't "get" fanfiction, and that's okay. All they know is that I write. :)

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

AO3 has my more recent works, and of course I've got one of the oldest stories on ff.net! My website is www.sherylnantus.com where you can find my original works.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

Glad to see people are still reading and enjoying it, twenty-plus years after the fact! Keep on boosting the signal, and keep believing! :)

Take care and stay safe!

(Posted by Lilydale on October 20, 2020)