I was a Delphi user who wasn't entirely sure what that freaky "email" thing was, and was quite literally years away from hearing of the world wide web.  My textbooks had yet to proudly bear "visit our site at randomhouse.com" on their spines, and I had yet to own a t-shirt demanding votes for "Naked Dancing LLama, frolic.org" in the upcoming election.  And you know what? I wasn't that impressed.  Being really online, thoroughly integrated into this amazing technology, was out of my reach.  Heck, the concept of *hyperlinks* was out of my reach.   Slowly, though, I like the rest of the world, came to appreciate what I could find on the Internet.

Then came the summer of 1997, and that little pop band known as Hanson.  All of a sudden I wanted nothing more than to surf the web for hours on end, ferreting out every imaginable bit of information about the sunny trio. And I did, learning about everything from their cat Mama to Ike's science fiction book, not to mention a billion other tiny details that I was tickled pink to be privy to.  Then came the day when I saw a site boasting "stories" listed on yahoo, and the rest is history.  I suddenly realized that not only was the Internet a place where I could get information, but also a world to which I could contribute!  As of October 1997, I became the proud owner of my very first webpage. It was devoted solely to Hanson fanfiction, and way back then I had half a story posted and my only graphic was a box of crayons I picked up from some clip art gallery.

It took more than a year for me to get comfortable with my words and their presentation online, and eventually I got sick of the junk. The advertisements, the confusing urls, the space limits. It was dumb, and pointless.  The next step was one that I had seen a lot of sites take before me, but it was no less foreboding. "Domain" has such a formidable sound to it, and I was nervous. With the help of a fellow fanfic author, Jenn, I finally did it. I finally went out researching how much it would cost and what it meant to have one of these personal pieces of the web.

That is, in a nutshell (what, do I hear you muttering about huge nutshells? Sorry.. had to be done) the birth of Hansonfiction.com.  Nope, we aren't HTML goddesses. Nope, I couldn't tell you the difference between a relative url and a url, or a frameset and a frame.  But what's it matter? We're not here to look pretty. We're here to bring life to words, to further the Hanson community, and to make life easier for both webmasters and readers.

This domain was brought into the world for the beauty of words, and for the power of creation.  We are living proof of the old adage that it's not the cover of the book that counts, it's what's inside.  Inside of us you'll find the fanciful, you'll find the romantic, you'll find the dramatic. We're etching out our own little place in the world, one where expression is encouraged and words are king, queen, and parliament all rolled into one.  Our words are our currency, our strength, our power.  We are artists one, artists all.