jedibuttercup

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Challenge #1 - The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

[Giving this a try again, though I can't promise I'll hit every challenge this year.]

Happy New Year, everyone. I'm known as jedibuttercup on several fanfic archives and Dreamwidth (and prior journaling sites) and have used a variation on that penname since 1996. (Though I am not known by that name on any other social media sites; it always amuses me to see the name come up elsewhere when I vanity Google.) I participated in the

snowflake_challenge once several years ago; it helped remind me why I was in fandom in the first place and nudged me to post more often, and since I've had a couple of slower years lately I thought I might try it again.

I am single, childless, and over 40; I work full-time as a technology and media manager, which means database management, website coding, document design, and other marketing and software-support related activities. I've been working for the same HR consulting firm since 2006, where I am lucky enough to have excellent co-workers and decent benefits, though I did my time in the fast food and office temp trenches before that.

I graduated college in 2000; I found online fandom about a year later and have since published just shy of 2.7 million words of fanfic. I'm a fairly voracious reader and watcher (lists linked in my regular intro post); genre fiction is usually most represented there, but I sample pretty widely as the mood takes me. My workplace does a monthly bookclub and discussion group, which helps. I also take yearly roadtrips with my best friend (40 US states, 4 Canadian provinces and counting) and the occasional trip with my mom. I have roots in coastal Texas, but have spent most of my life in the Pacific Northwest.

I have three niblings, the oldest of whom is dangerously close to obtaining a driver's license, and a spoiled 4-year-old fluffy gray tabby cat named Parker. My equally nerdy BFF and her husband both went to college with me; we found out years after we all graduated that he's a distant cousin (ninth, according to the genealogical charts), through my mother's father's well-documented ancestry.

I've found that life is much crackier sometimes than any half-way believable fiction ever could be.