Okay, in middle school through-out the beginning of freshmen year of highschool I got writing requests. Now, I didn’t tell anyone I specifically wrote fanfiction, but everyone knew I enjoyed writing. Mainly because I was in an honors class and ELA/English was one of my favorite subjects. So, I think that’s how everyone knew I was okay at writing. I found fanfiction when I was younger then 10 and have been working on multiple fics since then. I have completed around 5 with a word count of over 30k and they’ve gotten pretty popular. It began with wattpad, cringe one-shots, then I stayed on Fanfiction.net for a little, but I didn’t post on there. Quotev, and currently im on ao3 and tumblr where I mainly post.
Thats the background, now the actual confession. One of my close friends had a crush on somebody, let’s call her Z and the guy will be A. She was desperate for something and asked me if I could do something for her. Because of how nervous she sounded I thought she was gonna make me do something that would put us at a risk of expulsion. I don’t think it did, though. Not too sure and I don’t go to that middle school anymore, so I really don’t care. Z asked if I could write a story about the two of them together. Specifically, them going to prom and her standing out in his eyes. She sends me a photo of a dress and tells me that’s what she’s wearing in the story when A sees her. I felt anxious just doing this straight up, so I had her text me saying that yes, it was in fact her saying this and she, A, wanted a story written of her and her crush. Though, I was still feeling a little unsure and actually made her do something like a contract (sibling told me about legal stuff, and had explained to me what a contract was, so I thought it’d fit the situation). I also asked her to pay me for it, only around ~$5 but she had to pay half up front. A agrees, signs it, and I get to work. After making sure to take screenshots of our conversations as a backup, I began working on ideas. I would ask her once in a while what she wanted me to add/remove from the story. I got to a word count of around 2000 and it only took one or two days. I sent it to her, and apparently, she really, really liked it. As in, she began recommending me to other people. I wasn’t expecting it to happen, but I did begin profiting off of it. I wasn’t too worried about getting in trouble because I had the “contracts” (but I don’t think they’d really do anything because don’t BOTH parties have to make the agreement? Most of the boys in those fics didn’t know what was happening). I made it a rule that they couldn’t ask for anything sexual. I’m not surprised I actually had to specify because we were all teenagers going through puberty. I wrote stories that ranged from 400 words to 10k, full length multichapter works. The teachers didn’t know what was happening and everyone agreed to keep their mouths shut because they’re spending money to get what they wanted, plus I was a quiet, well-behaved kid in school most of the time. No one suspected me of anything (I also ran an exposing account in school). It did shock me that the “clients” ranged from popular rich girls who spent their parents money to the other well behaved quiet kids. I’m still good friends with Z, and we both write fanfiction about whatever we’re interested in and follow each other. We plan on hanging out soon.
TL;DR: I wrote fanfiction for ppl in middle/highschool and got paid for it, ended up making contracts for them to sign and kind of became popular.
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