I probably know your wife’s aunt from back in the day. (In the mid 90s a lot of G/B was pretty heavy on the S&M.)

:-)  Very very true - I’m sure we both know the aunt!  It’s funny, too - I have to add that, good as so many of the newer stories are, I sometimes do long to tell someone “Oh yeah, that’s a cool theme - (blank’s) story used that too,” or “This is intense; (blank) was really intense in (whatever story) too.”  The only thing G/B didn’t have in the mid-90′s were post-canon Cardassia stories, for obvious reasons.  But, oh man, we had everything else, both online and more frequently in zines - there were one or two, even written by friends, that were too far outside my taste for me to buy.  But that was the beauty of it - everything was tried and put out there.

Still, it’s fun to write fan fiction now, too, with the benefit of all that hindsight AND the new contributions.  I try not to be a 1990′s snob (although I’ve read, here and there, the musings of some present-day writers that come close in the opposite way,) but I gotta admit that I do adore much of that older stuff, back when the series was basically current and so much was new!