Memories light the corner of my mind

[jlh]

rubydebrazier has this theory of HP fanfic reading patterns. She says fandom is like being in a bathosphere:
Your first fanfic is something innocuous and mostly action-oriented
Then you start reading romance fics, and uncover your inner shipper
Then you read fics with a hint of sex
Then you read fics with some nice fluffy NC-17ness
Then you read something a little more hardcore
Pretty soon you're searching ff.net for PWP in your favorite pairing (this was, of course, back in the day)
And before you know it, Daisy Chain!Draco doesn't even shock you anymore.

It would surprise few of you (certainly not evil_erato, who gave me the link to DC!D in the first place) to know that I actually started at the bottom and worked my way up. Thanks to the lovely vanityfair, I have finally found that elusive very first HP fanfic I ever read.

Yes, friends, it was at nifty.org, and it was called Harry Potter and the Slytherin Ass. It is rife with misspellings (including "Shamus"), Dean is mysteriously absent, it actually takes place in first year (which is sort of squicky), and it's more fanfic of the movie than of the book. I read it and thought, oh, there MUST be some straight HP smut, mustn't there? (Oh, how little I knew.) Only, not at nifty.org, of course. So I started searching for H/H smut (yes, I was a pumpkin pie shipper from canon) and wound up at Astronomy Tower. This was in November of 2001. I immediately read everything at AT that wasn't R/Hr (which shows you how much of an oldbie I was at FA). It was months later before I started trolling ff.net looking for NC17--and in doing so, found my One True Beloved Fic, Of Linen, which at the time was NC17 for the drug use.

Read away, but hey, don't blame me. It was merely the horse what brung me.