Jedifiction.com

Archive
Name:	Jedifiction.com
Date(s):	1998 - 14 July 2004 (last update)
Archivist:	Sita
Founder:	Sita
Type:
Fandom:	Star Wars
URL:	http://www.jedifiction.com/
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Jedifiction.com is a Star Wars archive. Stories are sorted by author, title, category and time-frame.

Jedifiction.com is the reincarnation of "Sita's Star Wars Page." Just about everything that was there is still here, although returning visitors might be interested to see the list of what's been removed. This is an all-purpose Star Wars fan fiction archive, fully automated, thanks to a nifty little utility called Automated Archive. All types of stories are permissable, so long as they are set in the Star Wars universe and are rated below NC-17. See the submission guidelines for more information.

About

A long time ago (circa April '98), in a galaxy far, far away (the suburbs) there lived a girl (who speaks of herself in the third person 'cause it sounds snazzier that way) who wanted to write a Star Wars story. Not just any Star Wars story, mind you, it was to be an epic retelling of Anakin Skywalker's fall into darkness (Lucas-Smoochas, she had a whole year before Episode One came out, her story would surely be finished by then) and how Anakin's actions came to affect his granddaughter, Jaina Solo.

Now, this girl (who by, the by, took the name of Sita after a favorite character in a book) realized that such an undertaking would probably require many weeks of intensive writing, perhaps even months. Still, she wanted to be able to share her creation with the rest of the Star Wars community, mainly the smallish sector of YJK fans, as the story would be drawing heavily on those books which were set the latest in the Star Wars timeline. But, (being a control-freak) she did not want to have to rely on someone else to publish her work-in-progress. Therefore, she decided to build her own website to showcase her work, and not send it to anyone else until it was finished.

This website was first constructed on Geocities. Because Sita didn't have a clue about HTML, (but wanted to use the advanced editor anyway because "beginner" is just another name for moron) there weren't any normal line breaks (no amount of blank lines in the editor would do the trick; lots of ~'s seemed to work as a substitute). Nevertheless, she soon discovered the secret of the < p > and the prologue to her fan-novel was complete and posted.

About a week later, Sita decided her website looked stupid and the prologue stunk, so she scrapped them both and created a new site at Angelfire. At the new location, she learned about web design using a roundabout trial-and-error method. Anyway, the story (titled, after much thought, Memory) progressed smoothly, being updated at least twice a week over the summer. In fact, Sita even began writing other stories, though Memory was her primary work.

At some point or another, Sita was asked if she would post someone else's story at her site. Not seeing any reason not to, and always on the lookout for more fanfic, she agreed. Soon, others sent their stories to be posted. After a handful of people had their work posted on her site, Sita had the bright idea of getting her own domain and encouraging more authors to send her stories. So, in November of 1998, she whined to her parents and got one. (Jedifiction.com, if you had any doubts.) More and more authors sent their stories to the site, prompting Sita to try to make the submission process a bit easier by using a simple, copy/paste form that would email the story to her. Yet, as the site grew, Sita noticed that she wasn't writing Memory nearly as faithfully as she once did. Aside from the increased work maintaining the site, Sita had to contend with a new demon: school. School was important, Sita had been told, though it took up far too much of her time. And after a day filled with classes and homework, Sita found herself less inclined to work on her masterpiece. When summer finally came again, work was to be resumed. However, Sita, for reasons unknown, went back and reread her story from the beginning. Disgusted with what she'd written, she vowed to redo the whole thing. (After finishing it, of course)

Now, a funny thing happened during the summer of '99. Perhaps it was because Sita spent so much time formatting other people's stories, working on making the site look spiffy, or just plain writing other stuff, but Sita blinked and summer was over before she'd gotten to do hardly any work on Memory. During the next school year, Memory sat unmolested while Sita wrote plenty of MSTs as a way of venting frustration (and keeping her from "losing her muse").

Meanwhile, keeping up with the site began to take up even more of her time. After Sita installed a simple search engine to help make finding stories easier (the stories were sorted by author, with only an icon labeling the story as taking place during the prequels, YJK era, and a generic "Star Wars" for everything else), it often took her upwards of six hours to update the site with only a half dozen new stories and a few new chapters.

By the time summer rolled around, Sita again thought she'd get some work done on Memory, her reason for starting the website in the first place, but events conspired against her (something funky happened to her computer, making it so there were these vertical, blue lines all over the screen, aside from all the random freezing, that is). Even more troubling, Sita found that she'd all but lost interest in Memory and spent little time writing it, and even her other projects fell by the wayside. Sita felt her interest in Star Wars itself waning, and spending hours and days formatting stories grew less and less appealing. The New Jedi Order hadn't interested her much, and after reading Vector Prime, she was more bored than saddened by Chewie's death.

So, when, after much painstaking work on a mega-update, in October '00 Sita's computer hiccuped and lost everything she'd done and wouldn't let her onto the desktop for a week, Sita let it go. She didn't bother trying to recover the lost data. Sita left the website to rot, vaguely planning to return to it next summer. In the meantime, the computer problem worsened, and the computer had to be taken in and had a few parts replaced before it would work correctly. Some data, such as email addresses and unposted stories, was irretrievably lost.

Summer '01 didn't present the opportunities for which Sita had hoped. Instead, Sita spent the summer part in France, part in a house invaded by relatives, and the whole month of July sick in bed. The school year, of course, was out of the question, though when domain re-registration came up, Sita vowed to resurrect the site, as soon as she finished applying to college. As soon as she was accepted by a college, she amended. Then, it was to be as soon as her exams were over. Finally, after graduation (with her website on prolonged hiatus, Sita had found she had lots of time to concentrate on school and work on getting good grades, which inadvertently led to her being named Salutatorian, and that delayed getting started on rebuilding by about two weeks) Sita discovered the Automated Archive scripts, and thought they were just what she needed. People could upload their own stories without her having to spend hours coding them and updating indexes, and it would make finding the right kind of stories to read easier also.

Sita was a bit premature in her excitement to get the website back online. She went ahead and posted a reopening announcement before getting the AA scripts to work correctly. Since Sita's hosts used Windows servers and the AA required Unix, the scripts didn't work. So, Sita went shopping for a new host (Sita is now hosted by the folks at iPowerWeb.com, in case you were wondering) and spent most of June transferring her domain name (which took a lot longer than it should have) and then getting the scripts to work in the first place. Finally, on July 12, 2002, everything clicked. Then Sita went to Canada for a week, for reasons she was not told and retrospectively suspects there weren't any (though she did re-read Vector Prime and read for the first time the duology that came after it, and, finding the NJO much more interesting than she had before, is now catching up on all the books she skipped over).

Once Sita was back home, she spent eleven days working and typing and re-uploading everything. Eventually, she got it done. What you see here today is the result of all of her hard work. Excepting, however, for Memory, which Sita hasn't included in the new site. It will be back someday, but for right now Sita wants to reexamine her so-called masterpiece, and won't be publishing it until it's absolutely finished and perfect, which is what she should have done in the first place. (Then again, if she had kept it to herself way back when, we wouldn't be here today. So maybe it was a good idea after all.)