The things you find lurking in your basement. I thought these were gone forever but thankfully, I kept them all: my favorite X-Files fics from Gossamer back when I was spending several hours a day on Gossamer, all printed out on various shades of tinted paper and each with a cover I made by hand–as you see–bound in several volumes, and some of these migrated to AO3 but many indeed vanished from the Internet forever. I always meant to do a similar collection of favorite MSTings, back before Web Site Number 9 died, but most of them were both too hair-raising to reformat for printing and just far too long.
Sonetimes, figuring that since I was only altering them for my collection it wasn’t a crime or nuthin’, I would go through stories and rephrase a line here and there, remove passages I didn’t like, on occasion rewrite random paragraphs or change, say, an in-story reference to Sarah MacLachlan lyrics to a band I actually liked; every altered story had a scrupulously enumerated log of “editorial” changes attached as an appendix, since someday I might be called on in federal court to testify to exactly what I had altered and how. I started making larger “edits,” rewriting the occasional ending and once, since I have no shame, reworking a Mulder/Scully story into a Mulder/Samantha one (I still think it worked better that way). Eventually this did, in fact, lead to my sitting down and writing my own fanfic from start to finish, though ironically, other than one never-posted-anywhere practice run I’ve never written any X-Files fic. And that’s how I began to write anything at all.
If you ever want to find a permanent home for these wonderful items….
The various “fanzine archives” will gladly accept them as donations.