Snowflake Challenge #1 - Introduce Yourself

Challenge #1 - In your own space, introduce yourself! Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

[Giving this a try this year. I can't promise I'll hit every challenge, but hopefully it'll help get me posting again for non-fic related things!]

Happy New Year, everyone. I'm pretty consistently known as jedibuttercup across the fic and journaling sphere, and have used that name since 2002. (Though I am not the JediButtercup on Twitter or the one on Instagram; I was bemused to find not-me JB's out there the last time I vanity Googled.)

I work these days as a "technology and media manager", which basically means website design, database management, document design, and other marketing and software-support related fun. Mostly for the same not-for-profit HR consulting firm since 2006, where I am lucky enough to have excellent co-workers and decent benefits.

I graduated college in 2000, for some perspective; I found fanfic in ... 2001? I was living with my brother at the time and commuting to my first post-college job, and he loved having the TV going in the background all the time in the evening while playing video games. We tuned in at the beginning of both season 6 of Buffy and, a year later, Stargate SG-1 season 6, and I quickly caught the fixit bug. Followed soon thereafter by the crossover bug! Though that was neither my first experience as a writer, or my first experience as a fan (more on that in Challenge #2?)

I'm a fairly voracious reader, as much as time allows (see my yearly list posts) primarily in genre fiction, but also the occasional nonfiction book too. My movie/TV preferences are very similar; I have an embarrassment squick, and I have a hard time with plots that are primarily romantic or horror-centric or plagued by idiot balls, but actors and characters I get attached to can make up for a lot. I also take yearly roadtrips with my best friend (38 US states now and counting) and the occasional trip with my widowed mom (Disneyland last year; Grand Canyon coming up this year). I spent the first several years of my life in coastal Texas, but we moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1988, and I've lived there ever since.

I'm single, and have three young niblings and a very spoiled 13-year-old half-Maine-Coon cat named Berúthiel. My equally nerdy BFF and her husband both went to college with me; we found out years after they married and we all graduated that he's a distant cousin (ninth, according to the genealogical charts, diverging back in the 1600s), through my mother's father's well-documented ancestry.

Life is much crackier sometimes than any half-way believeable fiction ever could be.

Snowflake Challenge #2 - Talk About Your Fannish History

Challenge #2 - In your own space, talk about your fannish history. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Where to start with this one? I literally don't remember when I became a "fan" - my dad grew up watching the original Star Trek show live, and my parents went to see the original Star Wars on a date, and Dad brought home epic fantasy novels (ex: Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince series) and left them bookmarked in the bathroom all the time, so my brother and I were just naturally around genre properties from our earliest days.

I know TOS was in reruns when I was little; we were allowed two hours of TV per day, and one was usually post-school cartoons, but the other was always, always Star Trek. My first Star Wars in theater was ROTJ when I was a kindergartner. I learned my first French words from Picard swearing on TV, and drank my first flavored tea because of Earl Grey, Hot. Some of the first books I owned were Narnia, Pride and Prejudice, Lord of the Rings, and several Star Trek novels, all before the age of 10. So I was pretty much always doomed to be in the fannish sphere. :)

I also started writing fiction when I was very small; I learned to read when I was three, and I have a copy of a journal published by my first grade school that included the best story submissions from every year level, starting with one written by Wee JB, Aged 5, about a momma cat and her kittens. By high school I was writing the most ridiculous Mary Sue tropes imaginable longhand in notebooks to keep from being bored during class, starring yours truly and all her closest friends becoming spies or learning magic or discovering we were reincarnated historical characters or what have you. (Very, very glad that was all pre-Internet, because the world never needs to see any of it).

I was mostly too busy and tired to keep up with it in college; so falling into online fandom the year after I graduated was a breath of fresh air. I had ideas, and a place to put them, and people would read them and give me feedback! Luckily I started with a fairly popular fandom - the Buffyverse - on a popular site - ff.net - and within a year or two tripped over the crossover site Twisting the Hellmouth. That introduced me to writing for challenges and prompts, which led me to LJ and then DW and finally AO3, and I've never looked back. I flit between fandoms often - I blame that on the ADHD - but have some that I perennially revisit, too. It's harder to write when I'm depressed, but I'm also very aware that creating and publishing gives me back more energy than goes into it, so. I doubt I'll ever leave fanfic entirely.

Outside of fanfic, I've been to several conventions over the years, mostly with family and friends, and have spent probably too much money on POPs and autographs and branded LEGOs and logo'ed clothing and tie-in novels. (Not to mention Disney Plus.) But it gives me joy. And it gives many other people joy. And ... well, the very last conversation I ever had with my dad before his sudden death was the weekend I got back from getting Shatner's autograph, geeking out with him about it. Being a fan has just always been part of my identity, and always will be. *shrug*