Is this thing on?

So, here I am, on Dreamwidth. It's pretty shiny.

It occurs to me that this is probably a good time to reintroduce myself - to any new folks I'll meet here, and to the people who've had me on their flists for months or years and can't really remember where I came from.

• I'm thirty three, female, Australian/British. (Born in and live in Australia, but I hold dual citizenship.)


• My first degree was in genetics, but I haven't worked as a scientist since a road accident in 1998 left me with some long-term mobility issues; I can't comfortably sit on hard surfaces (like lab stools) and I can't run in the event of chemical spills.


• I'm a long-time geek; I've been playing roleplaying games regularly for more than half my life. We're currently playing Shadowrun.


• I used to write for roleplaying games as a freelance writer - I wrote for Shadowrun, White Wolf's Demon: the Fallen and a bit of general World of Darkness stuff, as well as some one-offs for smaller publishers that never saw the light of day. I stopped when burnout and fairly serious depression caused me to flake on a few jobs; I burnt a few bridges and let people down, which I still regret, but I only rarely miss the actual job.


• I'm a computer gamer; at the moment I'm playing WoW, and have been for four years. I write a fairly popular WoW blog for holy paladins called Banana Shoulders.


• I'm currently single, and not looking for a relationship at the moment for health reasons (long-term complications from the above-mentioned accident). However, it does get rather lonely sometimes, and I'm looking forward to being well again.


• I am a terrible procrastinator, easily distracted, and prone to on-off depression. As you can imagine, I don't get much done a lot of the time :)

So that's me. Hi!

Me and Fandom

And now for the 'me as a fan' introduction.

I have a woefully underused fandom livejournal as eleanorjane. EleanorJane - being my first and second names - is my fandom identity, such as it is.

I've been in and around fandom (in the sense that we use it now) since about 2001, when I started reading cupiscent's early XMMV fic. I'd never really heard of fanfic in that sense before, but it made immediate sense to me, and I fell headlong into reading XMMV, and from there followed my favourite writers into HP, SGA, Firefly, and a lot of other fandoms along the way.

I've never been much of a creator, though. I enjoy writing, but I never feel confident enough to create something out of nothing, and as a result I've produced very little over the years. (For some reason this only applies to fiction; when it comes to writing like blogging or semi-technical writing, I'm as wordy as you can get.)

I also find fandom kind of intimidating, to be honest. The individual people are friendly and polite, but generally I find that fans are only interested in following you if you're a fellow writer/vidder/artist. Which is fair enough, of course, but it does cut down the avenues for fannish squee and meta discussions if no-one's reading what you write.

I'm hoping to rectify both factors with the move to dreamwidth. I'm trying to push myself to do more, to create more -- and in fact I'm about halfway through my very first fanvid right now. (It is HARD, yo.) At the same time, I want to write more often and more intelligently about the media properties that interest me; I love the meta and the squee, and I want people to do it with - which means I need to be worth reading. ;)

Yuletide is the exception to the rule, in that I love writing for Yuletide and do it far more easily than with other fic. Part of it is the deadline (with actual consequences for missing it), and part of it is that -- well, I find big fandoms intimidating because I feel like all the stories have already been told. In Yuletide fandoms, they very clearly haven't and there's all that lovely blank canvas there just waiting for my inky smudges. I'm going to try and write more for the Yuletide NYR challenges, but that doesn't have the deadline factor to motivate me (as you can see; it's halfway through April and I haven't done a single NYR fic yet).

My participation in fandom varies. There are shows, books, movies that I adore and will always cite as my favourites, but they're not necessarily where my fannish interests lie. The fandoms I'm most eager to read and watch in are, equally, often not my favouritest media properties - but they're the ones where the fan creators tell the most interesting stories.

I'm not a "slasher" as such, and the tendency of (many parts of) fandom to ignore interesting and hot het relationships because of the slash goggles does rather irritate me. Still, if it's what floats their boat, good for them. And I should note I'm not at all hostile to slash, just to the preferencing of slash above all else. I still read, and love, lots of slash.

Shows I Have Loved (And, In Some Cases, Love Still): Farscape, Firefly, Futurama, NCIS, Leverage, Lie to Me, Burn Notice, Dark Angel, Alias, Doctor Who, Star Trek of any stripe except TOS, Red Dwarf.
Shows I Was Or Am Fannish About: Farscape, Firefly/Serenity, Leverage, Due South, Stargate Atlantis, Chuck, Heroes, Veronica Mars, Doctor Who. I'll read Burn Notice or Dark Angel if I see it, but I don't go looking. I read BSG and Supernatural if the summary indicates it's about a story arc or set of characters I'm familiar with.

Movies I Have Loved: The Fifth Element, The Blues Brothers, Hackers, the Star Wars original trilogy, The Mummy, The Matrix series (well, except Revolutions), Constantine, the Pirates of the Caribbean series.
Movies I Am or Have Been Fannish About: Constantine, Pirates, the Oceans movies, Iron Man, the Narnia movies, X-Men 1 & 2 (I haven't even seen #3), and I'm sure there are a lot of others I'm forgetting.

Books I Have Loved: Anything by Jane Austen, anything by Guy Gavriel Kay, the first half of the Harry Potter series (I only read the second half so I could knowledgeably read the fic, really), the Stephanie Plum books, Lord of the Rings & the Silmarillion, the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Discworld series, and plenty more I'm forgetting.
Books I've Been Fannish About: Primarily HP, and the teeny-tiny Kormanfic fandom (consisting of about twelve people, but we laugh enough for twelve hundred.)

Other Fandoms: Bandom (specifically the Fall Out Boy-centric arm of it), various RPF fandoms (particularly LotRiPS and BSGRPF - and, well, bandom!), bits of Marvel and DC comicsverse, and probably others I've forgotten.

Basically, I'll read anything if I think I have enough background knowledge (of characters or story arcs) to get the gist. :)

Sadly, I don't currently have a big active fandom - I drifted away from SGA a while ago, and nothing's come along to take its place. Due South was close, but there's a sense of 'done' there as a long-closed canon. I'm kind of hoping for something new to fire me up, to be honest. (Actually, I really hope Leverage fandom takes off. That would be awesome.)

I've been actively fannish - as in planning (if not actually producing) fan works, and meta'ing all over the place - in Constantine, Iron Man, Firefly/Serenity, Narnia and lots of the smaller Yuletidey fandoms, and I've actively consumed (in the sense of hunting out recs, following the newsletters, and so on) XMMV, Harry Potter, Pirates, Constantine, SGA, Due South, Iron Man and probably others I've forgotten.

...I have this terrible feeling I've forgotten fandoms and stuff that I adore, but I have no brain tonight so I'm going to stop blathering, post this, and go and get some work done. WoW guild officer meeting time, and then back to work on the fanvid!

To import, or not to import?

So, DW lets you import old journal entries, icons, and comments from other journalling services using the common codebase - LJ, IJ, et cetera. I'm debating whether or not to do that - moreso from my previous fandom journal than my regular LJ. I think I've decided against it, because:

a) it would ruin my 'fresh start on dreamwidth!' thing, both symbolically and literally (by cluttering up my journal page).
b) it would highlight just how unproductive and sporadic I have been, and how often I've said "I'm doin' it this time, I really am!". I'd rather not immortalise that any further. ;-)

So I think I'll just leave it be.

On another subject, it looks like I'm going to have to abandon my much-loved xJournal app, as it doesn't have any options for adding non-LJ accounts - although the maintainer is working on adding support for non-LJ accounts. I shall turn to iJournal in the meantime, but I remember not being a huge fan of it last time I tried it.

Admittedly that was donkey's years ago, though.