Challenge #5

In your own space, promote a canon/talk about a part of canon that you love. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock is one of my favorite shows. Though it debuted over 35 years ago, for me it's lost none of its magic. Fun characters, whimsical settings, and catchy songs are all part of why I still love it, but it goes deeper than that. Yes, the Fraggles love to sing and dance and play, but life isn't always carefree. The show often touches on serious topics and themes-- environmentalism, prejudice, the death of a friend, and confronting your own mortality, just to name a few-- but always carefully, and always in a way that's hopeful and uplifting.

Here are a couple of my favorite songs from Fraggle Rock:

( Watch videos )

Challenge #3: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

In your own space, tell us who, from one of your fandoms, would you most want to have dinner with (or tea, or a random afternoon visit), And why? This could be a creator, an actor, a costumer, a set designer, a director, a character, a composer, anybody! What would you talk about? What are you dying to know? Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I'll say Patrick O'Brian, if he were still alive. I started reading his Aubrey-Maturin series last summer, and I've been enjoying it. I often read with an eye to improving my own writing, and there's a ton I could learn from him. I'd probably ask him how he did his research, which works of fiction and nonfiction most influenced him, what kind of writing schedule he kept, how he planned out his books, and what advice he would give to writers wanting to improve their craft.

When some authors write period fiction, they often pack in historically accurate details that stick out too much, details that feel less like an organic part of the story and more like a signpost that says, "Hey, just a reminder, we're in the 1800s now, and since I spent hours and hours researching this period, I'm going to explain exactly how a Jacquard loom works."

O'Brian doesn't do that. There's something very natural and flowing about his prose, almost like reading an account by someone who might have lived during the Napoleonic Wars. The downside is that unless you've studied 19th century nautical terms, you're often going to have a muddled idea of what's going on. But O'Brian writes in such a way that it doesn't really matter. I still enjoy the characters and their banter without knowing much about the world they live in (though I really should make an effort to learn more). It also helps that one of the two main characters, Dr. Stephen Maturin, is a stubborn landlubber who never quite absorbs all this naval lingo either.

I decided to update my welcome post again for the occasion!

Challenge #6

In your own space, make a list — anything between one and ten things is a sweet spot, but don't feel constrained by that! - of things that you wish existed in fandom or elsewhere, or that you'd like someone to make for you.

Okay, I'm finally taking a stab at it:

* A messaging system in AO3. I get why they'll probably never do it, but still it would be nice to have the option to send private messages.

* My Little Pony merchandise that features Twilight Sparkle without wings. I haven't followed MLP:FiM for years, but every once in a while I'll see something like sheets of stickers that I'd be tempted to buy if not for that one detail.

* Faster, more disciplined writing skills. I NEED.

Challenge #2

In your own space, talk about your fannish history.

Sonic the Hedgehog was my first obsession. Well, the first obsession that led to fannish activity. I played the Sonic games for the Sega Genesis, bought Archie Comics' issues of Sonic the Hedgehog, watched the Sonic Saturday morning cartoon (Sonic SatAM), and created my own little Sonic website on GeoCities. Sonic is basically the reason I learned HTML.

There were other fandoms over the years, but mostly I lurked. I remember something of LiveJournal's heyday in the early and mid 2000s, because that was the place to go if you wanted to read Lord of the Rings fanfic.

About five years ago, my husband bought a copy of Morrowind for me. I like playing old games sometimes, and he thought I would enjoy Morrowind not only because of the fantasy setting, but also because you can "mod" it. I had never before played a game that you can overhaul to your liking, and I was hooked. I downloaded a bunch of other people's mods to make Morrowind a little prettier and more fun to play, but the best was Kateri's Julan Ashlander companion mod. Julan's story is woven into the main quest in a way that feels natural, and over time he changes and grows as a person. Julan isn't optional for me; if he isn't in my game, then Morrowind is missing a piece of its soul.

Then I moved on to Skyrim. While I think Morrowind has a better story and atmosphere, Skyrim is my go-to Elder Scrolls game. It's fun, it doesn't demand much from my brain, and there are tons of mods for it. There's a lot about Skyrim I can criticize, but the flaws are probably part of what compelled me to write fanfic about it in the first place. I almost look at fanfic as a form of modding, which is all about making the game more what YOU want it to be.

One of my must-have mods for Skyrim is Kris Takahashi's Interesting NPCs (also called 3DNPCs). It adds tons of voiced NPCs to the world, although I mostly keep it installed for a handful of characters like Rumarin. I like having him around, and he has a lot of fun lines. But the thing about Rumarin is that he's almost never serious, and his constant humor starts feeling like a front for something he doesn't want you to know. It's like you never truly get to know him. I wanted to get to the bottom of this and find out who this guy really is, and the only way I could do that was by writing a story about him. That's how The White Phial came to be, the first in a Skyrim fanfic series that I've been working on since 2016. I'm a very slow writer, unfortunately... but so far I'm persistent.

That brings us to now. I'm still trying to finish writing that series, and my husband beta reads my work. Proofreading and catching typos is the least of what he does; I rely on his feedback on whether the characters feel authentic, whether the situations make sense, and whether the story is headed in a good direction. The final results carry a lot of his influence.

I have to say that certain fandoms have helped shape me into who I am today. And that's likely to continue.