Soooooooo, I'm 30 now and I started when I was 12, on this RP forum for a child novel series called Warriors. This is about cats, wild cats that live in four separate clans. You follow this ginger kitten who runs away from home and joins ThunderClan and became Firepaw, he starts off as an apprentice and eventually becomes a Warrior and renamed Fireheart. The series is 6 books and lots of stuff goes down. By the end when I stopped reading those, they had 2 more sequel series and yadda yadda yadda. Who knows how much has been made since.
Ok going back to the Forum, you made your OC cat and you joined a clan. The clan leaders were moderators and they would promote you based on your growth in your writing, grammar, and descriptiveness in your adventures. This really helped me become the writer I am today believe it or not.
Obviously, I got older--outgrowing the whole cat thing and you know that teen angst couples well with smut, so AHEM, I was underaged at the time but I joined adult RP forums and got my freak on for several years--that was Yaoi Haven and i never got caight being under age. RP led me to write my own novels and I have 3... "4" series in the making but sadly I'm super critical of my own work so it's really hard for me to sit down and just tell my characters what they're doing instead of letting them run my book. You know how it goes lolz
So that how I started ^^