Back in 1992, Philip was an up-and-coming freshman at the Univeristy of Maryland, College Park. He was (and still is, beleive it or not), a Computer Science major, and was eager to get onto the 'Net. He even went so far as to get his WAM account before he started school, so he could explore from home.
Little did he realize that his entire life was about to change from that point on.
At first, he did the usual thing... email his old friends, try out the news readers, and putz around with his .login files (there was no WWW to play with then). He read the usual newsgroups, once he figured out how to edit his .newsrc, and lurked on rec.arts.startrek.*, rec.arts.animation, and rec.arts.mecha., among others. The school year began, and everything seemed normal.
Until that one day, early freshman year, when he discovered a thing called [Fanfic] on rec.arts.mecha.
The story was entitled "Robotech:The Misfold", and was written by Chris Meadows and several others. It was a round-robin type of story, based on the Robotech series of books and TV episodes. He remembered seeing Robotech back in grade school, and he still had all the novels, so he decided to read it. And he liked it.
He liked it a LOT .
In fact, he liked it so much, that he wanted to read more by the people who'd written it. One of those people was a Brian Bicowitz, aka Megazone, who had written something called Undocumented Features with his friends. Philip found out where it was, downloaded it, and began to read it.
Once again he liked it. He like it a LOT .
However, he didn't know who Kei and Yuri were, nor who Largo and the Boomers were, so he decided to find out. First by downloading Kei and Yuri's pics from the ftp site, then by looking at other fanfic about them. Also, he noticed they were a part of is thing call anime , and he decided to check that as well.
After an inital period of denial that he really liked anime, he broke down and admitted to his local club that he did like it, and became a member.
After this, everything seemed hunky-dory for a while. New UF or other fanfics would come out, and he attended the anime meetings. Over the summer, he ended up taking a summer class in acting, and in his free time, spent more time on the net.
That was when he had -- THE IDEA.
Around this time (the summer of his junior year), Philip noticed that certain elements in UF were similar to ones in his own life. He lived on a college campus, they lived on a college campus. He had weird friends, they had weird friends. And his imagination had as much potential for weird stuff as they did. So, inspired by the efforts of Gryphon, Megazone, Rerob, and PCHammer, Philip asked Zoner if he could use Gryphon, Megazone, and Rerob as the start of a story starring him, his friends, and the three of them from the end of UF4.
Philip was turned down, of course. Zoner and Gryphon were already planning something (Hopelessly Lost), but Zoner offered an alternative solution. Instead of having the three of them appear, have three Extradimensional entities appear instead. And if, say, one of them was female, then so much the better....
And so it was on a june afternoon in 1993 that the idea for Serendipity was born.
This isn't the end of the story, however. While writing Serendipity, Philip still also had to do computer science and other academic things. And, one night, as he was trying to do some english homework -- Philip discovered IRC (his GPA hasn't recovered since). There was where he found #Anime! and later #Eyrie, where he soon started spending a lot of his time.
Also, during his christmas vacation of sophmore year, Philip started to want to really know what one of the characters in his series looked like. So, armed with a pencil and sketchpad, Philip started drawing. He's still at it. He even took an art course, which helped improve his drawing style immensely. But he's still got a while to go....
More recently....
Philip's been slacking off a bit, writing and drawing-wise. But then again, what with Graduation and getting a Job, it's kind of to be expected, hm? But, don't worry.... in his off hours when he's not on IRC or Channeling, he continues to draw pictures and attempt to continue writing. It's been an uphill battle so far... but he thinks he can do it, all the same. :)
Philip's World / Philip Moyer / pmoyerATjuraiDOTnet