Fandom Snowflake Challenge #3-5
Jan. 8th, 2015 01:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tjs_whatnot
Day Three
In your own space, talk about your creative process - from what inspires you to what motivates you to how you manage to break through blocks. Does your process change depending on the type of creating you're doing?
Ho-hum. Yeah, I got nothing.
Or I do, but I've just been talking so much of writing these days. I'm still tapped from the blog tour I did last year. I have been enjoying reading other people's process. But, I should be talking about writing more, that's what us professional authors do. HAHAHA! I just don't know what anyone cares to read about. So, why don't you ask me a question, anything at all, about my writing, my process, how I deal with any aspect of it, and I'll have answers, either here or on my pro-blog. :)
Day Four
Comment to someone you haven't ever interacted with before or introduce yourself to someone you've interacted with and friend/follow them. It doesn't have to be anything complex - it can be feedback for a fanwork or discussing something you might have in common or even simply admiring their icon. The point is to reach out to someone you normally wouldn't and connect with them, even if it's only for the briefest moment.
Biggest cheater! But I did that with someone else on that day who said they welcomed anyone too shy to go and randomly talk to a stranger to come and randomly talk to them, so yeah. I DID IT! And we bonded over Spencer Reid. *sigh*
Day Five
In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story. How did you come to fandom, why did you choose your fannish name, do you have more than one secret identity?
Man, I spent a good chunk of time going through old posts looking for this story, as it seems I've told it before a lot of times. But I couldn't find it and realized too late, that if I had spent as much time writing the damn thing as looking for a cheat, I'd be done by now. :((( I'm not too bright sometimes...
Anyway... I didn't know anything about what "fandom" meant until around 2005ish. I knew about being a fan of things, and I knew about being obsessed with things, I just didn't know that there were places and people who shared these things that weren't part of a "fan club." I mean, I didn't live under a rock, I knew that Trekkies existed, but not in the real sense of what they are and how they function.
Then Harry Potter happened. I got into the books through my job. The sister in the family I was employed as a nanny for was right at the Harry Potter Generation age. We didn't really check them out for a long time because I didn't trust phenoms and she was into other things, but eventually it became apparent that it was something that wasn't going to be ignored and I think she was tired of not knowing what everyone was talking about.
I remember the first one took forever for us to finish and I don't know why. Now I think it's a pretty special book, but back then, it was just another of the gazillion books I read to my charges after school. The second one was even harder to get through, and I really think if PoA wasn't already in the house waiting for us, we would have stopped right there and never bothered to return. But it was, and it was magical. About halfway through that book is when I stopped only reading it when I was reading it to them, when I started reading ahead. A lot ahead. I finished PoA early one night and I tiptoed downstairs to get GoF and you know, read a few chapters, just to see...
When my alarm went off the next morning to wake the children up for school, I had finished the book. I was hooked! Then there was the wait for OotP, but that was okay, because we discovered the first four on CD and our commute to and from school would never be the same. ♥ Jim Dale ♥
Anyway, so I was a huge fan of the books, loved the characters and had favorites and least favorites, and would talk to the girl in my care about them ALL THE TIME, but I didn't know there were others who thought of them in the way I did. I mean, I understood they were a best seller, but still, that didn't mean that other people got it like I had. HAHAHA, man was I stupid.
I meet my first fandom friend in a writer's group. We bonded over feeling slightly dirty and wrong by noticing how fine our Mr. Radcliffe was becoming in the new movie, PoA. ♥ We've been besties ever since. She introduced me to fanfic, but she shipped Snape/Hermione and so I didn't really read any, but I still remember talking plot bunnies and scenarios with her, and that glee of writing something that was going to be entirely for me and for fun. My RL writing had stopped being that for a long while. She also introduced me to erotica... and yet I didn't really put those two things together, except that it also gave me that same freeing and slightly giddy feeling writing it.
She told me about Livejournal, but I didn't really know what I was doing. She also told me about HP conferences (she had gone to The Witching Hour and Lumos), but I was still skeptical about people not really liking the things I liked about the books. I mean, her favorite and biggest obsession was Severus Snape. Mine soooo wasn't. So, I guess I imagined these conferences were a bunch of witchy Snape devotees--which is what my friend was, and I loved her-- but a whole hotel of them? YIKES. ;)
Then Phoenix Rising conference happened. It was in New Orleans, one of my favorite cities in the world, so I knew if nothing else, I would be in a place I loved. I had written a story that I barely remember except it had some funny Ron's Bachelor Party shenanigans and a Harry/Rosmerta one night stand and for some reason--probably because I didn't know better--I submitted the bachelor party bit as a story of it's own to the conference people who were putting together a collection and I got to work with an artist and everything.
So, here I was at a fan conference without understanding fandom, with a story published and spiral bound for all the attendees to read, without having read any fanfiction myself. I was SOOOOO out of my depth. Add to that, the first night there was a dance party with about 12 Snapes--one of them dirty dancing with Voldemort to "I Will Survive" if memory serves. It was hysterical and a fun time, but still, I didn't really feel I belonged. Everyone seemed to know everyone.
The next morning before the con officially started a archive I'd never heard of (I'd heard of none, didn't even know what that was) was hosting a Ron Breakfast at Cafe DuMonde. So, even if I was there all by myself--I mean, who loved Ron as much as I did? At least there would be beignets. ♥ An hour later I had found my people. I had a buttload of fic recs to check out and people's livejournal names to friend. I finally understood what fandom meant.
That's how it started and I could go on about how it's all gone from there, how it's changed my life, what fanworks mean to me, both as a creator and consumer, but jesus I'm tired. As to my fandom name, when I first started and didn't know anything about anything, I chose a name that was very close to my real name. After a few years, I started to think that might not be the brightest of ideas. So took the first two letters of my LJ username because a lot of people called me TJ anyway, and added the word whatnot, because I think it is a word that really describes my random and strange. It works for me.
Wow, that was super self-indulgent and full of unnecessary detail. I feel I should give some sort of reward for anyone who suffered through it. ♥♥
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-08 08:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-08 08:31 am (UTC)♥ I miss our HP days.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-21 02:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-08 06:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-08 07:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-08 02:51 pm (UTC)Also Reid LOVE.
And YOU LOVE.
And Ron love. Of course. Always Ron love. <33
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-09 01:11 am (UTC)<333333333
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-08 07:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-09 01:12 am (UTC)I ♥ Fandom!
♥♥