Snowflake challenge part 1 (more parts coming this month!)

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while now and I was always too late… but now I’m on time! So here goes!

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Challenge #1

In your own space, introduce yourself!

Hi! My name is Buggy, and I used to write under a different name until I decided to yell PLOT TWIST in my writing life and switched stuff around in 2014/2015. I also kinda left dreamwidth/livejournal to post on my own website.

I am Dutch, I’m half way through my thirties (and in just 9 days even closer to 40!), and I have been writing for a very very long time. I wrote poetry when I was little, moved on to stories in my teens (pre-internet) and I’ve been posting online since 2005. Not all of them were good stories, but it’s fun to see how much I’ve grown in 15 years, so the old stories are generally still up. I speak Dutch, English and German, and a little bit of French as that language keeps coming back to haunt me when writing stories.

I am a fanfic writer, a radio presenter and I occasionally stream my radio shows or games on twitch. Yeah, I guess I’m trying to be ‘hip’. I’m so not haha.

I wrote stories for NCIS, Stargate (SG-1 & Atlantis), Sanctuary, Numb3rs, White Collar and Mutant X (and also some throw away stories here and there) before I moved on to The Vampire Diaries and The Originals and Teen Wolf with using Bella from Twilight and the Cullens as the bad guys as a bicycle. I sometimes revisit old fandoms and I usually try to have a nod in my stories to my other stories.

My internet wifey is Meeko and we write stuff together too. There’s some Arrow involved, Twilight, The Vampire Diaries… Covert Affairs… Person of Interest… yeahh we like doing weird crossovers!

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Challenge #2

In your own space, talk about your fannish history.

Oh dear god, where to start?!

Hmm… okay. Wow. So, I thought I started posting stories online in 2005. I’ve been saying that for YEARS, mainly because my livejournal was created in March 2005. HOWEVER, I keep forgetting that I had a livejournal before that where I posted stories and I think I ran from it? Okay, let me double check, I recently found an ancient artifact ™ in my stuff…

Which were notes on a story I pulled because I tended to write OUT THERE stories even way back when… and this was in a time where I dídn’t have normal access to the internet so I kept printing stuff out… This was printed from my yahoo notepad in 2004. Notes on a story, involving Mutant X and The Pretender…

THAT WAS 2004?!

It does explain why I can’t find the stuff I wrote back then.

I’m sorry, I need a moment to wrap my head around this.

2004.

I was 21. No idea what I was doing back then. Can’t remember.

Hold on…

*grabs wayback machine on the internet* *searches for old website* OHHH my old geocities website was around since 2002. Which makes sense, as my fanfiction.net account is from 2002 too. Oh, now it all starts to make sense…

But that’s where my online life started. My online story posting, but the journey started quite earlier.

The first time I got into contact with ‘fandom’ was when I was about 14 years old. Was it? I don’t know. You see, I once shared a storage space with my neighbor as his storage space was full, and he thought all my stories written on paper was old junk and threw it out without me knowing.

But hey, let’s see if we can reconstruct some shit.

1997: Met my RL best friend at a concert. Started writing ‘bandom’, handwrite in notebooks and every time we were meeting up (we lived across the country from each other) we’d have each other read our stories. We also attempted to write via snail mail; posting notebooks back and forth. Suffice it to say, that didn’t last very long.

1998: Still writing on that story. We wrote so many sooooo many. I think I attempted a crossover at some point during this year, with that band and Xena. Or Star Wars. Likely both. That was quite interesting. I also started writing stories with another friend who I met in school. We both loved MacGyver and Airwolf, and why not add some Space: Above and Beyond?

Went to my first convention. We didn’t get a lot of conventions over here back then so I jumped on it. Met Chewbacca and R2D2, and met L; who introduced me to fanfiction, Buffy/Angel, Jack/Daniel. Traveled a few times to L’s place, was surprised by the amount of fandom stuff she had, including zines and books, told me she got it from America, even new episodes on VHS!!

(oh, those were the times).

I remember reading the SFX and making penpals through that.

2001: I traveled to the UK for the first time on my own. Not with a friend, but by myself, visiting M, a penpal I made through the SFX. She was older than me, and her writing was simply fantastic. She was working on a past life kinda story and her choice of music was Celtic folk, that’s what I remember from her. She also loved Space: Above and Beyond and met the actors a few times. M introduced me to the Forbidden Planet.

2002: I created my ffnet account and started posting stories about The Pretender that nobody liked because Jarod/Angelo was gross, according to them. To me, it was a totally plausible pairing.

2004: Met DM and LW online. I started writing Mutant X stories under the name Willow. I think I created my first LJ? I decided to write a Mutant X/The Pretender crossover because the building they use for Genomex (Mutant X) and The Centre (The Pretender) was the R. Harris Water Treatment Plant. I mean… it worked? – I found the sequel to that story the other day, it’s a hard copy. Everything else is gone. *sniff* Anyway, I was on the unpopular opinion side of fandom once again for being a Mason Eckhart supporter and thinking that Adam Kane was the bad guy, but this time I wasn’t alone!

I also went to my second convention ever and met Michael Shanks and Christopher Judge from Stargate. There was a group called Dutch Stargate around in this time where L (who I’d met in 1998) was a part of, and I think I remained somewhat in contact with them? But I was the youngest and I lived far far away and never had money to go places so I kinda gave up on them, but seeing them at this convention was a lot of fun!

2005: Changed livejournals because I didn’t have the money to simply change my name and I can’t remember what my old name was, and it’s likely purged by now. But all the stories I posted online up to this point, are lost. Gone. Poof. I might have a few still on a hard drive somewhere but let’s keep them buried 🙂 I’m not going to look for them!

Through LWr, I met N and K, and a bunch of other nice people and rolled into my new fandom: NCIS. I found it a little scary to write in that fandom still, so I started writing a few crossovers with Stargate SG-1 (Jack/Gibbs) before finding my footing and started to write Gibbs/Ducky.

And then… most of my journey is in year in review questionaires. The latest is posted here. It’s fun to have this time capsule and see how much my writing has changed over the years. I’m still debating whether or not I should share my older stories with you, because they were like… bad. Grammar and spelling wise. And not to mention, the formatting! OMG.

This year, I’ll have my LJ for 15 years. It’s sad that fandom has died over there/everyone migrated or just upped and left, and I’m still looking for stuff on DW. Any recommendations for communities are welcome!

I recently went through my LJ and deleted/purged a lot of old things that I no longer stand for. I was an angry, young person and oh boy. But I also encountered all the shenanigans that had been had with my fannish friends, which was A LOT of fun to read back!

As far as I am aware, there are three people who I was friends with that passed away over the years. Gone, but not forgotten.

If there are any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them!

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So, I thought I’d post the entire snowflake challenge in one go, but if the prompts are going to be all wordy like this… yeah… okay. Let’s see what happens!

Should you want to do the snowflake challenge yourself; click on the link/banner below! There’s no need to have a Dreamwidth account!