Yep, long as one remembers it's all in good fun -- it's good practice and mental exercise

Slightly OT, but today at work, I got a great little idea (purely for fun, not profit) -- unpacking t-shirts for the shop I work at, I ran across one that has Tinkerbelle, looking slightly peeved, on the front, and just says "I didn't do it" on the back of one shoulder.  It totally screams for "I don't believe in faeries!!" to be added to it!

Chortled the rest of the afternoon just thinking about it....

Newly arrived in Chapel Hill, NC....  And definitely hopeful of finding gamers or even just coffee chatters in the area!

non-slash...  to be most accurate, sticking to cannon-accurate sexual orientation of characters; in other words, if the characters in a pairing are straight in the original work, they are straight in the fanfic.

In general, het sites are 'het-only' sites, mostly because the majority of mixed sites (like ff.net) are slash-heavy, and there are proportionally very few het-heavy sites, especially those that welcome NC17 material.

Nothing wrong with slash, it's all a matter of opinion.  Nothing wrong with bi or gay characters either, mind you, but in the case of fanfic, only when the original author intended it that way -- it's part of respecting the original work.

Good sites are hard to find; a lot of the really good ones (quality fic & friendly atmosphere) are often specific to a single fandom.
Don't bother with ff.net, they have no standards; if slash isn't your thing, the field of available quality sites is even narrower.
Open Scrolls (scribeoz.com) is good (and all het), and just opened up from an LotR-only to multi-fandom (including Firefly, DrWho and other v. good shows); they are open to new writers but have standards, and guests can read all but the NC17 stuff

I've done both fanfic and original work, and I'm an avid reader of published fiction and a very very selective reader of fanfic in a few chosen fandoms. 
I agree that there is some very bad fanfic out there, as well as some absolute gems - sadly, there is a lot of muck to shovel through to find those prizes, and it is easy to see why fanfic gets a bad wrap as a whole because of it.
I can tell you that fanfic helped break me out of a very long period of writer's block; I agree that it can be very valuable exercise in the art of putting together imagination and the written word, as well as the grace to accept constructive criticism along with praise (and indifference ) once one drags up the confidence to show it.
When I write fanfic, I enjoy the challenge and the shortcuts that a pre-existing world entails; I find it useful to take new interactions and situations and get feedback on them from fellow fanficcers; I find it pleasant to be able to commiserate with others who like to read and write, and share a particular world we are already fond of.  Writing is a lonely sort of vocation, each piece a labor of individual isolated effort -- with fanfic, well, there is the small comfort that others are right there suffering with you!   
As to what I'd feel if someone fanficced an original work of mine (assuming I manage to publish someday), well, I'd be flattered that something I wrote was 'alive' enough to jog someone's muse into action.    But at the same time, I understand why anyone would cringe, given some of the results...  Oh the many bottles of bleach my poor eyes have needed over the years!  Often the trick is to find a decent archive with a quality control policy; it can make a potentially painful search much more pleasant!:)


Hmmm... ok, so .02c turned into $1.20...  professional deformation? 

Sil