The Lord of the Rings

I know I'm not the first person to say "The Lord of the Rings" changed their life. But I bet that my story is a little different than most.

Over Christmas break in 2001, my parents took my step-sister and me (her 14, me 16) to see the Lord of the Rings movie. I had read The Hobbit a few weeks prior, and she had finished the whole series the previous year.

Something you have to understand is that at this point my parents had only been married three years. My step-sister didn't live with us and we went to different schools, on top of the age difference, we weren't really friendly and certainly not sisterly.

As we watched though, she leaned over and explained subtle differences between the book and the movie. On the way home our parents took us to a bookstore and picked me up an omnibus with all three books.

My sister's next weekend with us was unlike any before. Suddenly, we had something to talk about. We had a connection. Even my parents noticed and happily left us to gush about our newest obsession.

When it was time for her to go home I was actually sad for the first time. Her weekends with us got better and better after that. Eventually, I finished the books and we found ourselves wanting more. As tends to happen with young, imaginative minds, we discovered fanfiction and before long, I was writing stories for my little sister.

What followed was more than a dozen self-insert fan fictions about my sister and me. We were elves, humans, halflings, and modern girls magically transported into Middle Earth. I'd churn them out as quickly as she could read them.

This hobby eventually led to me writing original fiction, mostly fantasy. A few years ago, after I'd finished my first original novel, my sister emailed me a file simply titled "Scanned Fics." I clicked on the file and there were all of my stories. She had kept them. All of them. Some of them were handwritten, some typed on early versions of MS Word; all of them chock-full of typos, terrible grammar, and every fanfiction cliché you can imagine.

I asked why she'd kept them all this time. She said at first it was a keepsake, the memory of what finally connected us as sisters. Later, when I started writing original pieces, she thought it would be fun to have something for me to look back on and see where I started.

With a weird mix of embarrassment and nostalgia, I read them. To say my skills had developed over the years was an understatement. I still have all of them. They're saved in a file on my laptop. For self-preservation, they'll never see the light of day. I don't know that I could handle the embarrassment. No, their contents will stay a secret between my little sister and me.