Back when I was to college, I was part of a Gundam Wing yaoi mailing list for Heero Yuy and Duo Maxwell (1x2x1 ML forever!) On that mailing list was a girl who called herself snowtigra. We started chatting over IRC (yeah this is how long ago this was) and ended up doing a fic together that was a terrible Resident Evil/Gundam Wing crossover that’s still on the internet somewhere, I’m sure.
Anyhow, long story short, we’re still together after 11 years somehow.
One day, while chatting over IRC, we started roleplaying with anime characters. They came from all sorts of series, from Gundam Wing, to Yu Yu Hakusho, and we just… kept doing it. We started calling it “dating.” She lived in Minnesota and I was in Iowa for school, so we were long distance, but every night we’d get online and “date.” This involved coming up with random plots for these characters, and as we got into more anime series and video games, more characters would show up. Like, “Hey, Gaara is really cool, we should put him somewhere,” or, “I’m really obsessed with Kanji and Naoto right now,” or, “Sebastian and Ciel, please.”
When I moved up to Minnesota, we got an apartment together. One day, after she picked me up from work, we found out that our apartment had been broken into. This included our laptops, which had the file on it we used to roleplay. So, we had to start all over again.
That’s when things changed.
Suddenly characters were changing. For example, we would think, “This would be awesome if it were a female lead,” and so boy characters changed to girl characters. Then we came up with the concept of “The Storyteller,” a creature who lives in a library full of books, each book depicting someone’s life. At some point we realized, you know, these Naruto characters aren’t really the same anymore. We sort of… created our own characters. Like we were still using the name “Haku” but it wasn’t really the same person.
Then, about two years ago, she randomly wrote up a teaser chapter. The characters were renamed, no more Ky Kiske or Gaara, no more heartless or Netherworld, because those things weren’t those things anymore. Then I added a bit to it. Then we sat down and made an outline. The outline ended up creating seven book ideas. She wrote the first one for NaNoWriMo two years ago, then I read over it and added things/took things out and jazzed it up.
We realized, “Fuck… we have a story here.” So she sent it to publishers.
Now we’re signing a contract with Alpha Wolf Publishing.
And thus became the dorkiest love story ever told. The Hunters series started with us being in a long distance relationship where we would roleplay every night to talk to one another.
To all of you roleplayers, fanfic writers, fan artists, and all that’s in between, here is my message to you. Keep doing what you do. Because you never know what it will turn into. This is what it did for me.
Oh, and “Treat Me Kindly,” the book I’ve written on my own? Use to be a Naruto fic that I never finished. After dissecting the fic I kept the first sentence, one of the original characters I created, and two of the animals.
