Still enjoying this after all these years

In reading the forum today while I was sitting in an airline lounge, I realized that I'd never introduced myself under this thread.

Name is Shadar, used to go by Sharon Best and before that Betu Best. Been around writing in this genre since the days before there was this genre. Still get a kick out of reading good genre fiction and writing my own stories (as I have time).

Created the Aurora Universe back in 1993 or so, and took it through a bunch of incarnations and ups and downs. Once upon a time the AU kind of stood alone. Now there are so many great writers and good sites. Like this one, of course.

Little known facts:

AU was first hosted on Oznet in Australia, although I had always lived in the US. That was in '93 or so, back when the Net was an oddity and I didn't know how to create a web site. A friend did. He was Australian and a fan.

There have been at least eight writers who first debuted their work on the AU. None of them had ever thought they would ever write anything. I was one of them.

Not so fun fact. Two of the eight writers died while in the middle of their most ambitious work (Mac and Toomey). A terrible loss, both personally to all of us involved, but also in losing their wonderful vision into this genre. I knew where they were heading with their characters and it would have been an incredible journey.

Once upon a time this genre had such terrific growth that the AU kept blowing out servers, moving gigabytes of data back when a busy site moved megabytes. That cause it to move several times. Also cost me a mint in traffic charges. And about a hundred emails a day from readers that I had to answer. It got overwhelming.

Today with broadband, gigabytes are nothing, but at the same time, the genre seems to have settle down to the true believers.

Lastly, I'm stoked that we are getting three new 'super' films this year. Superman Returns, Super-Ex and then Wonder Woman. That's an incredible bumper crop by the standards of the last 13 years.

I just read an interview with the star of Superman, Routh, who says he's been signed for two more movies through 2009. That's 100% confirmed. I've also heard from two usually reliable sources that one of those two movies is likely to include Kal El's cousin with the blonde hair.

Here's hoping that's true as well... it's only been 22 years since the last feature movie appearance of Kara Zor'el.

But if the Superman franchise ignites, and with the Supergirl comic now a best seller, I believe the time is finally right. All we need is for these three movies to make some serious money and we're going to be swimming in interesting movies.

I know we'll all see these first three... now if a few tens of millions of other people will too, the next few years could get interesting.

And a lightyear distant from the silence of 1993.

Shadar