Not long ago, Dr. Merlin heard that remarkable little "ding" that indicates new mail has come to her inbox. Among the "c1a!1s" ads and offers to help relieve someone's burden of too much money (all just for sending the numbers of Dr. Merlin's bank account), there was a review for a story posted back in 1995. The story was nothing special, a quick AU dashed off one morning before class. An old fandom, an old 'ship, a story idea that went nowhere. Dr. Merlin had mostly forgotten about it, had archived the story at ff.net just to have a place to put it. But for the time it took to go back to the story and see what the reviewer meant, I was back there again.

Be kind to your old fanfics. Even the ones that were never spellchecked. Even the ones that starred Mary Sue You, dressed in sparkly purple spandex and saving the day astride her rainbow unicorn. (The unicorns were canon, okay?) Sure, some of them are going to be a little embarrassing, and the longer you write, the longer your list of perhaps less than genius works will become. More, if you had a habit of saving your papers from your younger days, somewhere you've got a handwritten account of how you helped Luke, Leia and Han get the Falcon back into the sky after a crash.

Old fanfics are love letters to fandoms we've long since broken up with. Maybe they were the fast, furious scribblings of the first flush of love, the first hot kiss, the cracktastic crossover idea nobody ever had before (at least that you'd seen). Maybe they were the lingering goodbye, a final, gentle stroke or a hard, bitter "Go fuck yourself." The characters you created, the ones you used, for a while, each lived inside your head and in your words as truly as they ever did on the screen or the page. Rewatching the old episodes, cracking open that first book in the series, it's all a means of traveling through time and revisiting places you'd almost forgotten.

Sure, a fandom that ended on a bad note (even just a bad note for you personally) is going to take longer to revisit with all the love intact. There may be episodes you never watch again. There may be stories you wrote that fixed those episodes, and it might hurt to read them because, if you did your job the first time, you're going to be reliving those same issues as you put them to rest. There may be stories someone else wrote that you cannot reread because once was more than enough to change you forever. That happens.

Time won't and can't heal everything, but you might be surprised when you go to revisit an old friend.

That episode you hated when it was first-run could seem much less repugnant now that you have some distance between your expectations and the reality. That book you don't acknowledge in your favorite series may very well hold up much better now that you've read the sequels and found out how bad things could really get.

Reread your old fanfiction. Remind yourself of the things that used to make you squee. Remember those characters for the things you loved about them, not the messy wrecks they became later, victims of fanon and creator ennui. Recall the adventure when it was still exciting, even if the effects suffer in modern terms.

When you come across fanfics written by someone else for series long ended, take a moment to check the publication date. You may be reading someone's long-dusty testimonial to a series she barely remembers, or you may have discovered a brand new gem in a mine long since thought dried up. It could be crap, but even so, it's crap that once meant the world to another fan.

Don't be afraid to go back, either. Sure, you've moved on. You've let that fandom go and discovered the Fandom of Righteous Glee, or at least the Fandom of Right Now. You've learned new writing tricks, and finally gotten over those bad habits of rapid POV switching, self-insertion, and quoting the BeeGees at every opportunity. So that those tricks, that knowledge, and take a look back. Take the pieces of your old fandom that didn't hurt, the ones that still make you catch your breath, just a little. Ignore the rest. Set it aside. Drop your old drawn-out world-building scheme from the private fandom universe you created in your head nine years ago, and go back to the simple truths: there were these people, and this is what they did, and if your readers loved the canon too, they already know why. You don't have to live there in the past. But you shouldn't fear visiting.

When you go on again, to that next sparkly new show or book or movie, you can take your new lessons with you, that even among lousy dialogue, cheap effects, and swiss-cheese plotlines, you could find things to love then, and you will find new things to love. Possibly with a budget, possibly with a clean and sober writing staff, possibly even with characters who show their intelligence and independence onscreen instead of hiding it with tantalizing hints under the piles of "WTF?!" And you will write crazed, impassioned stories that will burn you as you type, and these too will eventually go into a virtual box under the metaphorical bed when you find the sparkly thing after this one.

Keep the stories where you can find them again. You'll want to pull them out one day and remember just how you felt tonight, if only to laugh at yourself.