Now, over the years, there had been some excellent pieces of fiction that I'd been pointed at. I always tried to read them if only to be fair. I would save the ones that were, in my opinion, well done!
Then after enjoying Leeway so much, up to the point where it had been finished at the time, I decided to go ahead and look around the site.
Wow.
I was pleasantly surprised. In the past, TG Fiction sites seemed to specialize in the stuff I didn't like and maybe 1 in 1000 were something I liked. Now, this isn't to say that those sites were BAD. No. Just not the kind of thing I was into.
TopShelf, however... it was like the ration was the other way. There was about 1 in 100 that I didn't like!
Why, most of the stories I'd archived over the years were here, too!
I settled in and began to explore for a few months. There were a lot of really good TG stories that I had never seen or even heard of the authors! Then I started to think... "Hey, I can do this..."
And so I did. In 11 days, I wrote and posted as fast as I could, the first 8 pieces of Sk8r Grrls and to my surprise... people loved it.
Now, at that point, Erin was ecstatic about the fact that she was up to the point where her authors were posting an average of a story per day!
Wow!
Nifty!
Gee willikers!
... and I watched the site grow.
... and grow...
... and grow! By January 2008, we had an average of 8 to 10 stories being posted daily! Why, some days there were lots more... there were even the rare days with over TWENTY stories being posted in a 24 hour time period!
Stories were being posted so frequently, in fact, that they couldn't stay on the front page for more than a few hours and people were missing some really good stuff!
So I had an idea. I asked a few folks about how it would be received, and then took it to Erin.
She said, "That's a great idea, but it's awfully time consuming. I don't have time to do that. If you code it and post it and do the updating, sure, I'll add it."
So I joined the admin team here on 2008 January 19, with the introduction of Shortcuts! and over the next few months expanded it to give the Holiday of the Day, and then a link to information about that holiday, and provided a way for folks to be able to see what they'd missed that day without having to click through pages and pages of links to figure out what they'd read and what they hadn't.
The point being, that the method of posting here, making it so that the authors add their own content, is a great deal of what makes TopShelf so special -- it's constantly updating. Glad you're enjoying it!
