celebrating 11 and a half years of the fandom I said I'd never join

[pauraque_bk]

Mixed feelings about hp_reunion, since so many of us are still here and have no need to be reunited! But I realize for many people HP fandom is now a long-ago memory and a reunion makes sense. I guess we should be glad it's stuck around long enough for that to happen.

Either way, today seems to be the day people are recreating or pointing to their first post in the fandom. Mine seems to have been on a mailing list called HP Improv.

But then! My friends from X-Files fandom persuaded me to get an LJ, which I had previously said I would never do. At the tender age of 20, I was already a stodgy old-timer who'd been in fandom for years, and I was sure this newfangled LiveJournal thing would never catch on. Online diaries were for high school drama, not Serious Fandom Business. Usenet and mailing lists forever! (Not sure whether to laugh or cry here.)

At last I caved and joined the 21st century, and broke the champagne bottle on my LJ's bow by reposting my very first HP fic, which I'm pleased to say is not embarrassingly bad. (Fortunately I was only new to Harry Potter, definitely not new to writing.)

And here's the post: May 6, 2003.

Notable things:

• I was still using my fandom moniker from my mailing list days. Why isn't my LJ called eodrakken, then? Because I didn't understand yet that my LJ name would be what people would call me. I thought it was more like an email address, and that people would call me whatever I put in the author field of my fics. (But yes, I'm good with being called pauraque now.)


• I used an "archive" field! That was actually a thing on mailing lists and I did not know it wasn't a thing on LJ. It meant that I didn't want people taking my fic from the mailing list and posting it on their own fic archive sites without asking, which sounds completely nuts now, but was actually a normal part of fandom then.


• I liked Draco! I never really stopped liking Draco, but I did fall into a crowd for whom he was not a liked character, so I sort of lost interest in him.


• Aw, the first comment I ever got on LJ was from someone who's still a dear friend (though going by another name online now). That makes me so happy.


• Very obvious that I wasn't new to fandom as I already had people showing up and making silly inside jokes from the XF mailing lists. ♥ But I think I started friending HP people really quickly after that.

This entry was originally posted at http://pauraque.dreamwidth.org/47840.html. Comment here or there.

Comments

[pauraque]

Yeah, that sounds right. Susan was like me, she wasn't much for the latest new gadgets. Her being here definitely made me feel more at home, though. What a shame it would have been to lose touch with her back when the mailing lists were fading away.

Right, you started getting into HP around the time I was starting to need a break from it. In a way it doesn't surprise me that you were writing more after your dad's passing; I remember after my mom died I sort of channeled everything I was feeling into being really prolific in fandom for a while.

Is muridae_x still around at all? She's never been one to post a lot but I know that doesn't always mean she's not lurking.

[thimble-kiss.livejournal.com]

Yeah, creativity can be a good and fairly constructive diversion for misery. I actually think it helped me a lot at that time. Viktor/Hermione was just the perfect pairing for me at that moment, too. I always struggled to keep Krycek mean enough, and it was a relief to be able to write something more gentle and in a fandom that's probably more of a natural fit to me as a writer.

Muridae is still around, yes. Work and other RL stuff pretty much swallowed her whole for a while, but she still comments regularly when I post. And she's been lovely enough to step up and do beta every time I emailed about a new fic, though that's beginning to be a while ago, now.