KJ

How this works: You comment, I give you an age (please tell me how old you currently are, since I don't necessarily know) and you fill out the meme questions with what applied to you back then, and now.

wordweaverlynn gave me 32. I turned 32 in 2005.

( A year in the life. )

Day Twenty-nine: If you made a deal with a demon what would your bargain be?

Of the vices embodied by the standard Dragon Age demons -- rage, hunger, sloth, desire, and pride -- I'd probably be most tempted by sloth. No one who mostly knows me online believes this, but I am, in fact, incredibly lazy. I avoid chores and errands, put the bare minimum of effort into a lot of things, and am almost always happy to spend a weekend kicking back on the couch with TV or a book or games or the Internet. So if a sloth demon came along and offered me some kind of deal where I'd never have to do housework again, or go grocery shopping, or deal with any of my inane tasks at work, I'd take it in a second.

Complete list of questions

Ganked from cereta, because I haven't done one of these in ages, and I'm in the mood for something quick tonight. A few real posts are brewing, but not together in my head yet. Soon.

SIX FOUR NAMES YOU GO BY:
(I got stuck for any more than that)
1. KJ
2. owlmoose
3. K____ J____
4. K___ (short version of above full name, which is what people who knew me before college call me)

THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:
1. A turquoise sleeveless mock turtleneck
2. A black overshirt
3. Dichroic glass earrings of very dark blue, almost black

THREE THINGS YOU WANT VERY BADLY AT THE MOMENT:
1. For my megaflare_ff fic to be finished
2. For morale at my workplace to improve from its current rock-bottom levels. I keep thinking it can't possibly get worse, and then it does. Feh.
3. For it to be next weekend, when I will have an Amy and some They Might Be Giants!

THREE PEOPLE WHOM YOU HOPE WILL DO THE MEME:
1. Anyone who wants to
2. Anyone else who wants to
3. Maybe especially the people who I've added recently -- it's fun to get to know new people better!

THREE THINGS YOU DID LAST NIGHT:
1. Drafted a scene for my Mega Flare that had been giving me trouble
2. Drank a latte at Borderlands Cafe while working on said scene
3. Had dinner with friends

THREE PEOPLE YOU LAST TALKED TO ON THE PHONE:
1. A library vendor
2. My manager
3. Someone who needed to renew a movie

THREE THINGS YOU ARE GOING TO DO TOMORROW:
1. Sleep late (please o please)
2. Work on Mega Flare
3. Finish my current k-meme WIP (I hope)

FOUR OF YOUR FAVORITE DRINKS:
1. Coke made with real sugar
2. Coffee
3. Sparkling water
4. Sangria

THREE THINGS THAT MADE YOU SMILE TODAY:
1. "Still Alive" coming up randomly on iPhone shuffle on my way home from work
2. This (NSFW, and possibly life) animated .gif of Alistair
3. Some really cool new graphic design books

When I first became active in fandom, back in 2005, I was the very definition of "monofannish". I only wrote in one universe -- Final Fantasy X/X-2 -- and had very little interest in branching out. I would happily read fic in other canons, FF and otherwise, and I would write and talk meta for all kinds of sources, but when it came to creating fanwork, I was perfectly content to hang out in my own little corner. Friends would convince me to check out other sources, and I would often enjoy them, but never was I really tempted to start writing fic. And it's not as though I hadn't thought about it; once I got involved in fandom, I started looking at everything I read, watched, or played as a potential source of story ideas. But nothing outside of FFX and FFX-2 ever gave me anything powerful enough to be worth writing down.

Since those days, I have branched out a little, in that I am more able to take prompt ideas for fandoms I'm not really "in" and do something interesting with them: Sunshine, Star Trek, Babylon 5, other Final Fantasy games. But in all that time, I've only really discovered two new fandoms. The first was Final Fantasy XII. I played the game when it first came out, and wrote a few Kiss Battle and prompt meme stories, but I didn't get deeply into it in a fannish way until I replayed and, at around the same time, wrote three stories for the 2009 round of Final Fantasy Exchange. I was finally hooked, and I started considering myself a part of the FF12 fandom from that point on.

The second, and the first outside the realm of FF, was Dragon Age. I'm still in the first blush with this source, and I've only just started playing the sequel (about which more on another day), so it's hard to say yet whether it will last, but I have a feeling it will. Already, since finishing my first playthrough of Origins in April, I've published three stories, have several more in progress, and am devouring fic at a rapid rate. I haven't felt a creative rush like this since I first entered fandom, and it's got me to wondering: why? Out of all the games I've played since 2005, all the books I've read, all the movies and TV shows I've watched, why is Dragon Age the one that finally broke through? I've been thinking about it, looking for commonalities, and have come to a few preliminary conclusions.

1. I need a lot of compelling source material.
It is surely no coincidence that all of these canon sources are video games. And not just any games, but multi-hour RPGs, with tons of background detail, large casts, strong stories, and settings with complex history and culture. A game is many hours longer than your average movie, and unlike most TV series it usually tells a single coherent story, which I think helps me connect with the characters.

2. I need some gaps to fill.
This might seem to contradict the first item, but actually I think this is part of why games work for me as a source. Many books, especially series, will have the detail I need, but they don't leave as much unsaid, either. Games tend to elide a lot more backstory and character interaction, leaving me more room to play with the universe and the characters. I need a careful balance between Items 1 and 2, and so far games seem to hit it better than any other media. More often than not, I write a story because there's a question I need to answer. The more gaps there are, the more likely that many such questions exist.

3. I need a 'ship.
But not just a 'ship that I like. Plenty of sources have 'ships I like, even adore, without driving me to write about them. No, I need a complete and total OTP obsession, to the point that I need to know more about them, explore every facet, bring them together and split them up and reunite them and see what happens. First it was Paine/Nooj and then it was Ashe/Balthier and now it's Alistair/Warden, but the pattern is clear. (There are interesting similarities between these pairings, but that's another post, too.) This was the realization that came as the greatest surprise to me, because I write so much gen, and I sometimes look sideways at the focus of some fandoms on 'shipping. But it fits, too, because I am a character-driven writer. Even my gen tends to be character-driven. And romance can provide a lot of fascinating opportunities for character interaction. It occurs to me that, the times I've jumped into a new fandom, the romance has come first, and then as I've written those stories, new story ideas come to me: gen stories about the characters in my 'ship, different pairings, new characters. And so I branch out. It happened with FFX/X-2 and with FF12, and I imagine it'll happen eventually with Dragon Age.

So, now that I've gotten my tl;dr on, what's yours? What draws you to become fannish about a source, rather than just liking it a lot? Are there patterns, or is it more random? I'm curious to know if other people's experiences are similar, or very different.

Comment with "Come at me," and:

- I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can get to know you better.
- Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
- Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.

I love this meme and can never resist it. This time, the questions come from regann.

1. What's the best thing about your job/career?

I get to shop for books with other people's money.

No, actually, that's the silly answer, although I have to confess that it's a pretty fun perk. The actual best thing about being a librarian is that I don't have to know everything, I just know how to find everything out. Knowledge is power.

2. What is the best candy on earth? (AKA, your favorite)

Ooh, that's hard. Because I have a serious sweet tooth. But I guess if I had to pick one, it would be the Maya Gold chocolate bar from Green & Black's. High-quality dark chocolate with orange and spices. Yum, yum.

3. What's your favorite TV show, either currently or of all time?

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Although Avatar: The Last Airbender is becoming a strong contender for that honor. Clearly, I like TV shows with colons in their titles.

4. Mixtape of your life -- what's the grand finale track?

Talking Heads, "This Must be the Place"



Because it's about being settled, and happy with the life you've made for yourself, and I can't think of a better way to wrap things up.

5. What's something you want more of in your fandom(s)?

In Final Fantasy, I would love to see a more active community. We go in boom and bust cycles, but overall it feels like things have really been slowing down over the last few years, and I would like to see more life in things like FYFF and the Kiss Battle.

As for my shiny new fandom, Dragon Age, I need to get out there and meet more people who are active in it. The community exists, so this is all on me, not the fandom. Partly this is due to being a game behind and therefore treading lightly to avoid spoilers, but hopefully I won't have that excuse for much longer! So at that point it will just be about getting over my nervousness about meeting new people.

Ganked from renay and 3_2_1. Oh-so-very image heavy.

So the idea is to take a picture of the bag you carry around along with its contents. But I couldn't narrow it down to just one; there are no fewer than four (4) bags that I use on a regular basis, and it didn't seem fair to leave one out.

( Many pictures behind the cut. )

And there you have it. Hopefully it is at least vaguely interesting as a slice of my life. Sorry I didn't get clever and number the items in each picture like some other folks did. I thought about it, but with five photos to number I would never have gotten around to it.

renay asked me to share some favorite quotations.

This is tough, because I enjoy a good quote, but I don't tend to save them. In fact, when I want to quote something, I usually have go dig into my archives, or the Internet. This wasn't always true -- as a teenager, I started keeping a book of quotes, which I would write down in colored marker in a blank book that I purchased specifically for that purpose. Song lyrics, mostly, although prose and poetry quotations as well. A quick dig through some storage boxes turned up the book, and the vintage of the song lyrics would suggest that it was mostly written during college. Most of them unattributed; the lyrics I recognize for the most part, but others come from sources I can't remember. If only I had noted whom I heard say Backrubs and blood drives are evidence that there is a god on earth or A curious sense of unreality suffuses most parts of my life.

Given that the last quote in the book is a Barenaked Ladies lyric that was almost certainly meant to be a dig at my ex-boyfriend, I probably stopped writing them down sometime in 1998, which is just around the time that any famous quotation or song lyric I wanted would have become findable on the Web. And so I stopped keeping track. When I do save a quotation, it tend to be about words or books or language, like the three that live in my journal profile. I enjoy matching a quote to a situation -- going through that quote journal, I was pretty well able to guess what (or whom) I was thinking about when I wrote each one down -- which makes it harder for me to pull out a quotation when I'm not thinking about anything specific.

So here is one perennial favorite, a line of poetry I have long loved, and an appropriate way to sum up any personal entry:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

-- Walt Whitman, A Song of Myself

30 Days of... Project! Complete list of questions / Ask a question on LJ or on DW.

lassarina asked about my experiences playing Tabletop (or what I think of as "pencil-and-dice") RPGs.

I have long enjoyed playing RPGs. My introduction to the genre came from oswulf, who was a big fan and had all kinds of systems; D&D, Gurps, and Star Frontiers are the ones I remember offhand. Starting from our pre-teen years, we would play whenever we could, which was unfortunately not on a regular enough basis to get a long campaign going. But it was still always fun, and led to, among other things, a life-long running gag regarding the dangers of chairs.

The first time I ever got involved in a regular campaign was during my college years -- not while I was away at school, but when I came home for breaks. D and S, the guys I was sort-of dating during much of that time (yes, at the same time; yes, they both knew about it; yes, it's a long story that's only tangentially related, and maybe I will tell it sometime, but not today) were both big gamers, and D invited me to join a long-running Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign that he'd been running since high school, and I gladly accepted, taking on an Elf ranger-type fighter who hated humans and didn't much care for other races, either. That campaign led to many others; some of the more memorable were a couple of Star Wars games (one in which I played a hotshot Imperial pilot who defected after Yavin, and another in which I was the daughter of a spaceship manufacturer who went into business for herself shipping X-Wings to the Rebellion -- she is officially my favorite player character ever), a few rounds of Call of Cthulu (to the GM's consternation, I decided to play a woman famous for writing books about organic gardening, which is not your usual Cthulu mythos character), a Teenagers from Outer Space campaign that sadly ran for only a few sessions but featured some of the most fun I've ever had gaming (I played a goth girl who drove a black VW Thing with the best stereo system in the known universe), and a one-night D&D one shot where I ended up getting myself and most of the rest of my party killed in the gladiator ring. I've also dabbled in Mage (the character I created for that game is one I've thought about resurrecting for a story some day), Champions, and Shadowrun.

After graduation, I moved away from that group of friends, and I've never been in a position to game regularly since. A couple of years ago, I was invited to play in a short campaign run by Jed, in a system he created himself, and that was one of my best gaming experiences ever; it was more like participating in an interactive story, which when well-done is something I love. I like a GM who can think on their feet and allow the players some freedom while still guiding them down the intended path.

I've done a couple of one-shot live-action RPGs also, run by my friend E, and they were a blast. I would definitely be up for doing something like that again. One thing I've never done is acted as GM myself, and I'm perfectly fine with that -- I think I'm much happier as a player, along for the ride.

Would I play regularly again if the opportunity presented itself? Probably, although making time for regular gaming sessions is tough, as we discovered during Jed's short-term game. That's the main reason I haven't sought out a gaming group -- time. That said, if another short-term gaming opportunity comes up, you can be sure that I'll jump on it.

Finally, no discussion of RPGs would be complete for me without a mention of dice. I love dice. I love how they look, I love the feel of them in my hand, I love the sound they make when they're rolled. There's something so tactile about them, unlike any other fidget toy. I have many more sets than I reasonably could need, just because I think they're awesome.

30 Days of... Project! Complete list of questions / Ask a question on LJ or on DW.

In other news, I didn't quite finish the story. Almost; I could probably post it as is, but really it needs at least one more editing run to be presentable. Fortunately (?), Yuletide signups have AO3 running so slowly that we decided to extend the deadline by a week to save everyone the frustration of trying to upload, so I have a bit of a reprieve (and so do the rest of you!). Fingers crossed, it will be ready in the next couple of days.

3_2_1 asked me about my adventures in the world of arts and crafts.

I used to draw when I was a kid. I was never very good at it, but it was fun. I enjoyed art class, and if my dad wanted a picture to illustrate one of his sermons, or Children's Time, he'd always ask me to do it. Mostly I drew people, faces, fairly cartoony. Or I would take my mom's old Sears and JC Penney catalogs and cut people out of them, looking for different pictures of the same models, arranging them into families and making up their histories. I wasn't creating artwork, not really; I was creating characters, telling stories about them in my head, using crayons and collage as a my medium instead of words.

I have always been a storyteller, even when I didn't realize that was what I was doing.

In seventh grade, I was one of only four kids to select art class instead of a study period. (The others were all boys. Most of the girls did chorus instead.) And I remember the year before, driving down to a nearby city to do drawing, although I remember very little about the actual doing of it. But I also remember starting to feel frustrated by my limitations as an artist. I was hopeless at doing anything really representational, and there's only so far drawing geometric patterns and childish animals, faces, and trees will get you. When we moved to California, where my new junior high only had six class periods instead of the eight or nine I'd been used to in Iowa, and there was only time to take one elective if you were on the college track, I had to choose between music and art. I picked music -- band, in those days; I started playing the flute at age 10 and was still really into it at 13 -- and at that point I pretty much stopped doing art. In college, I considered being an architect, and I even took a year-long studio course, but I was even less skilled at drafting than at freehand drawing. I can barely draw a straight line with a ruler, and I despaired of creating a true right angle. It was just too much work for not enough reward.

So I gave up on art.

I'm even less of a crafts person. My mom does a lot of fabric crafts: sewing, embroidery, knitting, quilting. She tried to teach me, and I did a little bit -- she still has patterns I embroidered, somewhere, and I made a couple of scarfs and a skirt. But I've always been a little clumsy, a little slapdash, not exacting enough to master fine details. (See above, re. straight lines and rulers.) So I lost patience with that as well, and renounced craftwork pretty much entirely. The one exception is beaded jewelry: I've always been drawn to shiny things, and particularly beads, so it was something I'd kind of always wanted to do. In 2004, when I was simultaneously unemployed and planning my wedding, I decided that learning how to bead would make a good project, so I went to a bead store (Beadissimo in the Mission, now sadly defunct) and asked them to show me the basics. They did, and I made necklaces for my bridesmaids (as well as a prototype that I kept for myself). Behold, a picture:



I still play with beads sometimes, making mostly necklaces because I don't wear bracelets and I find messing with earring findings takes more fine motor control than I really possess. I do all my beading on wire rather than string, because I can use crimp beads rather than having to tie knots. I don't do it as much anymore, because I don't trust my cats not to make problems. But I still enjoy it when I do. I've thought about learning metalworking, and that's something I may do someday. It's on the back burner for now, though.

Even though I don't consider myself a crafter or an artist, I still love the supplies. I can happily wander around a store for an hour, looking at papers and pens and paint, fingering cloth and petting skeins of yarn. In recent years, I've picked up an affectation for writing with pens in colors other than blue, black, and red, which scratches the artistic itch for me, just a bit. Sometimes I do wish I were more accomplished in the area of arts and crafts, that I hadn't let given up on them so easily. But for the most part I'm content to confine my creativity to other areas: writing, music, baking. Even if I am sometimes a little bit jealous of the cool stuff my friends can make.

30 Days of... Project! Complete list of questions / Ask a question on LJ or on DW.

I am going to exert meme-writer's privilege again and switch around the order of topics, because the question originally slotted for today is one that will take time and research, and my schedule today is more suited to tapping out a post on my iPhone. (There's a post idea: the ways in which owning a smart phone has affected my life, for good and ill. Hmm.) So: justira asked me to talk about the things I love and do not love about being a librarian.

Getting this out of the way first: I love being a librarian. A colleague once told me that librarianship is not a job or even a career; it's a calling. And that stuck with me, because it really is like that, not just for me but for most librarians I know. I cannot, at this point in my life, imagine wanting to do anything else with my life. So take that as a given.

( Top three awesome things about being a librarian )

( Top three non-awesome things about being a librarian )

This question comes at a weird time for me, because that last point has recently manifested itself quite forcefully at my place of work: book budget cuts, centralization of some services, and just this week a reduction in staff. So right at this moment, I'm not feeling too positive about my job. But my confidence that I've found the right line of work (and there is a difference) is unshaken. I'm proud of what I am, and what I am is a librarian.

30 Days of... Project! Complete list of questions / Ask a question on LJ or on DW.