"What sort of writing?" I asked. Since she was a recently converted Goth, I thought there'd be a couple of darkly romantic vamp-teen angst tales in the offing.

"Naughty FanFic!" she said, and that was my step into an alternate world.

In the speculative fiction hierarchy, fan fiction traditionally occupies a place in the food chain only a touch above slash (which I will get to) and is often denigrated by so-called "real" writers. But the truth is that a fanfic writer may amass a readership and fan-base bigger than most pro-writers in this country can ever hope to attain.

The two places to find fanfic are on websites such as fanfic.net, ff.net and a host of other smaller sites dedicated to the book, movie or television show the fannish apocrypha is based on. In some cases, there is so much fan fiction available in relation to a subject, two kinds of story arcs occur. There is "canon" - the original work, and "fanon" - the oft-mentioned apocryphal suggestions fans have made part of their own fannish myth.

Fanon is often richer and more interesting than the commercial counterpart, suggesting affairs and secret liaisons, family relationships and timelines that canon never mentions.

But once the relationships become steamier, then fanfic has strayed out of mere alternative fiction to the wicked world of slash.

Slash fiction originally made its mark around fan writing based on TV shows such as Star Trek. Slash writers - being most often older female fans - would forgo the unwanted female romantic interest to indulge in stories about their two favorite male characters having a relationship...with each other.

Readers and writers of slash nearly always have a favorite "ship", ie: relationship, be it Bodie/Doyle, Blake/Avon, Kirk/Spock, Wolverine/Cyclops ... if they are fictional, they'll be immortalized somewhere sharing an intimate moment with their best friend ... or their worst enemy. The more difficult the pairing, sometimes the more highly regarded the story will be.

In fact slash, and its female counterpart "femme-slash", is so strongly oriented towards same-sex pairings, that a common warning in the author's notes is the presence of "het" - a heterosexual relationship. Hey, it's slash, no-one wants to see that weirdo straight stuff!

The internet has a big part to play in fan fiction, bringing the fiction forums to readers across the world. This has also brought grief to those media company consortiums that own the copyrights to the characters which fanfic might deal in. Most fanfic writers use pseudonyms, are as untraceable as ghosts, and virtually none make any money. They're too hard to find.

In the end, the entity subjected to the obligatory "cease and desist" letter from the company/artist's lawyers is the fanfic website hoster. As to whether the hoster follows the request to C&D is up to how hard the lawyers want to push - and how willing the original artist is to risk losing the very fans who pay for their living.

So what did I do on discovering this strange, secret writing community? Well, I thought I'd try my hand at a bit of NC-17 slash. After the post, several e-mails came my way from all over the world, as well as a "recommended" review on a respected slash website. I was delighted, having entered a secret world and been found worthy.