Anime North Fanfiction Contest History

I was introduced to the concept of anime in December of 1995, during my first year at University. I saw my first anime early in 1996. I first started doing serious fanfiction writing in late 1996 (first story being my Sailor Moon/Sliders crossover).

1. 1999: I submitted the first part (Prelude) to my extended story "What Evil Lurks", which I had completed less than a year earlier. (You can find this submission here.) However, the part does not work well as a stand-alone effort, and I did not place.
2. 2000: This time I actually wrote a stand alone story tailored to the contest, namely The XS-Files, a Sailor Moon/X-Files fusion. It was actually one of three ideas I'd had at the time, having written a brief story intro to each of them; if you wish, you can read these intros here. That year I won for "Best Comedy", just barely over the runner up.
3. 2001: I decided to push the envelope this year, and write a story that included as many crossovers as I could manage. Mostly because I wanted to get away from "Sailor Moon", yet at the same time my anime watching was limited to anime showings, so I couldn't decide on a series to work with. (The poor contest coordinator had to put together quite a long copyright list.) The final result was the fic Dreamworld, and while I think each blending worked out not too badly, as a whole I'm no longer thrilled with how it fits together. It didn't place.
   • This was also the first/trial year of the "Iron Author" fanfic competition, and my name was randomly drawn to be one of the competitors. I wrote (on a laptop computer) the fanfiction Pooling of Efforts in two hours, which appears there just as it did in the competition. No indenting and blank spaces between paragraphs was something of a timesaver!
4. 2002: I fell back to comedy, having been told by people that that my "Irony Chef" parody was well written. I'd already completed the first sequel, and so it was Irony Chef 3 that got entered. It didn't place. (I'm still not clear about what happened that year; apparently there were a lot of comedy entries or something, so no Comedy award was given out. Oh well.)
5. 2003: I considered not entering, but decided I'd prefer to have the last entry I made at least place. I fell back on "Sailor Moon" (again!), but decided to focus on a minor character when I wrote the story Lost Love. It won an honourable mention in Character Study, along with one other entry.
6. 2004: I almost didn't enter. Three things changed my mind: The fact that the contest had been reorganized to include different categories, the fact that the deadline date was later in the year, and the fact that I knew I was going to write this particular fic ANYWAY, whether I entered it or not. I stepped up my deadlines and finished it under the wire. When I found out I'd won a category, I decided that was really and truly going to be it for me. So it was a shock and a pleasure when I learned the category I'd won was the Grand Prize! *^.^*
   The fic itself is "Read or Die: Time and Tide" and you can either read the Anime North Submission, or the Full ROD Story which, once completed, was more than 1,500 words beyond the word count maximum.

So, six years later, I guess I'm a decent writer! Just takes practice. :) Or something.

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