Fan Fiction became big–and fast. I was posting our first fan fiction stories by hand by myself. People would mail in stories which I would make into a really crude web page and then create a link to that story on our fan fiction main page. After about a month of that, I asked Jared to create a database for Fan Fiction stories.

There are two milestones in the history of this site that changed not only the site, but my life, forever. This fan fiction database was the first of the two. For those who have been around for those two years, you’ve seen the Fan Fic archive evolve from my ugly web pages to this phenomenal piece of software that it is today. We’ve asked your input–and sometimes you gave it even when we weren’t asking–and we’ve made many enhancements and improvements over the years. The one improvement we weren’t able to apply to L-word.com was the chapters/stories elements. This does appear in the Creative Writing and The L Life Fan Fic archives. It was just too late to go back and retro-fit L-word.com. I am very sorry for that.

It was late spring 2004 when the second milestone emailed into my life. I got this incredibly zany email one day for this character from Turkey who was posting all over the board. I didn’t understand a lot of what she was saying because she was, well, a character. CowGirl will also tell you that she learned English by reading fan fiction. I was an English teacher for 15 years at that point, and Cowy would have put all my students to shame. This woman learned English faster than anyone I’d ever seen. Fan fiction was her motivation!

CowGirl sent me a huge letter one day, proposing that I let her change the look of the site. I knew it needed big help, and I took a look at her letter and links to all the sites she had designed, and said, “YES, PLEASE!” In September 2004, we went live with CowGirl’s design that you see below. This design–and CowGirl’s friendship–changed the course of this site and both of our lives. We now work together full time on L-word.com and theLlife.com, and I am thankful for her friendship and her talents every single day.