The First Thing I Saw On The Internet

The challenge of the day is to write The First Thing You Saw On The Internet, in which Lauren Modery writes about falling deeply in love with X-Files Fanfic. To be fair to her readers, Lauren points out that X-Files fanfic wasn't really the first thing she saw; the first thing she saw was Alta Vista's home page, but things get awkward and sticky from there, in a very good way.

The first thing I saw on the Internet wasn't fanfic, and it wasn't X-Files. It was 1991, and I went specifically looking for erotica. The first thing I found was, Cthulhu consume me first, a Brady Bunch sex story. It wasn't even fanfic. It was a nasty piece of work, but what made it all the worse was that I'd been a literary erotica reader for years already when the Internet became available to me. I'd read The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, and The Happy Hooker, and just about everything else I could get my hands on; I'd even started to find the racier romance, like Bertrice Small and Catherine Coulter (at least, before she went mainstream). And this awful piece of trash, this A Very Brady Sex Story, was so horribly written, with so many grammatical and spelling errors, that I couldn't even enjoy it.

Part of that may have been because I wasn't at all familiar with The Brady Bunch as a series, and had no idea why it may have been funny that Marsha was being banged by the family dog.

I was actually so upset by the tragic quality of the story that I chose to write my own. The rest is pretty much history.