I like fan fiction and am tremendously grateful to it. I was a part of X Files fandom while it was hot and wrote fanfic for about 4 years. Before I got involved, I didn't know I could write but disovered that I could after I wrote my first couple of stories. There is nothing like the thrill of writing a hot story with lots of cliff-hangers!

Am I stealing somebody else's characters? No, I'm borrowing them and not making a dime off it. In XF at least, the creator has implicitly given his fans permission to write (he used the name of a fan-fic writer in two eps of the X Files as a sympathetic character). That said, fan-fic is only good to teach you plotting, basic writing, dialog but not character development since you're taking a given character and taking it from there. I'm ready to create my own primary characters now, although I did have a blast with the plotting. I just need a place to do it and, hopefully, sympathetic and knowledgeable people to write with.

I haven't written in other genres and don't plan to borrow Harry or anybody else from the Dresdenverse!