scripsi | Entries tagged with sunshine challenge

One more post before vacation.

Challenge #7

The Ferris Wheel

Journaling: Life in fandom goes through ups and downs. Reminisce about the "wild ride" of your time in fandom or in other online communities.

The net wasn’t around when I was a teenager, but if it had, I’m sure I would have written fanfiction. Because even if I didn’t write them down, I did long and elaborate stories about The Lord of the Rings in my head. First merely adding a female companion to the fellowship, but after I read Silmarillion I made up more independent characters and adventures. I’m sorry I never did write them down, but I still have some of the synopsis for them.

I ventured online for the first time in early 1999. My son was a newborn, and one sleepless night I did a search for Dorothy L. Sayers and found a mailgroup that had just decided on a read.through of all her books. It was my first online community, and we had so much fun. Now, 26 years later, I´m still in contact with some of them. At some point we decided to write a round robin to create Harriet Vane’s fictitious detective novel Death 'Twixt Wind and Water, as it has a fair amount of clues to reconstruct. It was great fun, and the first time I wrote fiction in English. This mailgroup also introduced the concept of fanfiction to me, as some members also wrote Harry Potter fic.

For a couple of years I read fanfiction now and then, but never considered writing it. That changed when I happened to see a promo shot of Jason Isaacs as Captain Hook in Peter Pan in 2003. Peter Pan was one of my childhood favourites, and this picture triggered me into writing. For about 2 years I wrote feverishly, and wrote some really dark fanfic. And wrote myself into dealing with some trauma from my teens. To cut a rather long process very short, writing fanfic helped me heal in a way I had not foreseen, and was instrumental in shedding a depression I had lived in for years.

I didn’t write much between 2005-2013, even if I did write from time to time. I divorced, and juggling work and being a single mother gave me little time and energy for it. Even when life settled down I had got out of the habit to write, but in 2013 there was a sudden death in my family. It was a terrible and traumatic experience, and it triggered me into another feverish writing spell. I had just re-watched Doctor Who, from the First Doctor and onwards, and I started writing Whofic.

Once again I found writing very therapeutic, but after the first rush of writing I realised something I never consciously realised before. I love writing. It’s good for my well=being, regardless if I write a blogpost or a fic. Up until early 2022 I wrote steadily, exploring a number of fandoms and ships. Then I had a creative freeze when the war in Ukraine happened. I couldn’t do anything creative at all for a long time, and only got back to writing on a regular basis earlier this year. It feels good to be back!

As of now I have 123 fics on AO3 in 26 fandoms. 94 of those one-shots. I mostly write het, with a preference for strong and competent female characters and morally ambiguous male ones. I just checked, the ratio looks like this, F/M (80 fics), Gen (33), F/F (7), M/M (5), Multi (5). All my fics are in a historical and/or fantastical fandom. As a history nerd I spend a lot of time researching history when I write.

My fanfics can be found here.

No energy at all for doing the creativity prompts right now.

Challenge #4

Fun House

Journaling: What is making you smile these days? Create a top 10 list of anything you want to talk about.

Getting a message from Stepdaughter with pictures of my granddaughter.
Face-timing with my nephew and niece.
My cat.
Taking a walk by the lake where I live.
Going to the summer house.
Finishing a sewing project.
Trying a new recipe and really liking it, so it gets added to the dinner rotation.
Thinking about it, cooking in general makes me smile.
Finishing cleaning the house. I loathe the actual cleaning, but love the finished result.
Listening to music I love.

Challenge #5

Journaling prompt: Be a carnival barker for your favorite movie, book, or show (or any other of your choice - game, comic, anything else)! Write a post that showcases the best your chosen title has to offer and entices passersby to check it out.

I will do a little rerun here, and point you to this post, where I talk about two of my all time favorites, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers.

Challenge #6

Journaling prompt: What games do you play, if any? Are you a solo-gamer or do you view games as a social activity?

I don’t play computer games, apart from solitaire. I’ve tried, and promptly get mind-numbingly bored. I do enjoy board games on occasion, though.

Journaling prompt: What are your favorite summer-associated foods?

Creative prompt: Draw art of or make graphics of summer foods, or post your favorite summer recipes. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

My favourite sumer food probably sounds very boring, but if one takes care to use the best quality possible, it’s delicious. Boiled white fish with new potatoes, clarified butter and chopped hard-boiled eggs. When I was a child the fish we used was northern pike, which my father or grandfather had just caught, but nowadays we usually buy fresh cod. The new potatoes come from the garden. The clarified butter must be real butter, and organic eggs taste the best. One can mix the butter and the eggs, but we prefer to keep them separate, so each can take after taste.

Also, for me this tastes best eaten outside the summer house, on dishes called “Grön berså” (green bower) by the Swedish designer Stig Lindberg in 1960.

Tunnel of Love

Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.

Creative: Write a love poem to anyone or anything you like

I love the light. Living in Sweden, summer means white nights, and there is something special walking outside at night, with the stillness and the scents, but no darkness. I love soft summer rains, like today, when the air smells wonderful, and the sounds of raindrops on the roof makes me feel sleepy and content. I love spending time in the summer house in the archipelagio outside Stockholm, in the house my grandfather built, and my grandmother filled with art. Now my mother is adding her own. There is no better place in the world for me to be.

I’m not poetry minded, so no poem.

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.

Creative Prompt: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community.. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Journaling: I will try to actually write the posts about the Agatha Christie books I’m currently rereading. As well as continue talking about books that have special meanings for me.

I have lots of things to sew. Currently a Regency petticoat, and after that a Regency ball gown for a ball at the end of August. I’m also working on a Liberty of London aesthetic dress. I also need to change a couple of everyday clothes that don't fit me anymore.

Creativity: I’m still trying my way in making paper flowers. Here, have a tulip.

And the last Sunshine prompt. This was a fun challenge- I hope it returns next year!

We wanted to end this challenge with something a little different.

At this time, we want to encourage everyone to make a post to discuss at whatever length comfortable something they love about themselves. We recognize that this is both very introspective and personal, and that sharing the results can be difficult. If you need to keep your post private, that’s fine! What’s important is that we all take this opportunity to be daring and push ourselves out of our comfort zones in order to be more kind to others, but more specifically ourselves on this one. Reflecting on ourselves and putting it in writing is the goal.

If you are able to share your post in some way, we also invite you to ask your friend list to comment and add things they love about you as well. You may well be surprised by the results.

Just remember that we could all use a little sunshine in our lives, and while it's great to have friends and family who love and support you, it important to recognize that sometimes we need to be our own light. Be warm and bright. Love yourself. ♥

I’ve thought a lot about this, and it’s interesting how, when I have thought of things I like with myself, I start to counter with my less positive sides, or adding that even something positive can be negative under certain circumstances. It’s really super easy to talk about what I like less about me. But let’s not go there. Let’s only mention a few of the things I do like about me.

I like my integrity. It was hard-won, and I don’t compromise it. I’m usually pretty easy going and diplomatic, but not when it comes to my core values.

I like how I look. It may sound shallow, but it took me many years to like and embrace my looks. I was bullied into believing I was hideously ugly and unattractive in my teens, and it wasn’t easy to overcome.

I like my artistic talents. It has brought me so much joy all my life, and as long as I can write and sew and draw I will never like things to do.

Our love of fandom knows no bounds, and it is not limited to fanworks.

This is the time to share all of the things we have collected over the years showing our love for our favorite fandoms. This can include both things we personally own and things we wish we could add if money/space were no object. It also includes stories and memories that brighten our days.

Have a fandom tattoo? That custom keychain your friend made you 10 years ago? That life-size statue of Iron Man someone made that lights up and you absolutely would center your living room around if you could get your hands on it? Convention stories, internet friendships, and the ensuing shenanigans … anything that makes you smile when you reflect on it, we’d like to learn more about it!

I don’t have any fandom collections. I collected things when I was younger, but they were always geared toward my interest in fashion and costume. I collected dolls in national clothes from other countries, and paper dolls in period clothes. But as an adult, there were too many years with limited living space and little money, and I kind of fell out of the habit of collecting things. Perhaps I’m interested in too many things to feel passionate enough about something to collect.

I do have a lot of great fandom memories though. In 1999 we got our first modem, at the same time as I became a mother. I spent many nights awake with a cranky baby, and living in the countryside several kilometers from the nearest village also made me feel very isolated. Then I found an email group focused on the crime writer Dorothy l. Sayers, and I found fandom and a community. We discussed sayer’s books and so many other things the group eventually got a subgroup devoóted to any subject under the earth. I read my first fanfic in that group. I wrote my first one too. I met people from it in the USA, Scotland, and Sweden. For years I chatted with people in that group daily. I’m still in contact with many of them on Facebook.

A few years later, when email groups started to turn extinct I had a similar experience with a forum dedicated to Jason Isaacs. I had a lot of fun, met several of the people there IRL, and am still in contact with a lot of them on FB. The forum also introduced Livejournal in my life and was my entryway to write fanfic more seriously. And on Livejournal and later Dreamwidth I’ve stayed. I’ve met a few of my friends here- I met even more people I’ve got to know through my interests in costume history and sewing. Some of my best friends IRL are people I once met on Livejournal. I’ve no plans to go anywhere else.

Now that we’re well into this challenge, we hope that most of you have been able to reach out to new folks and begin to cultivate new fandom relationships. We’d like to see this go a even a step further!

This challenge is to explore other journals to find wish list items that you can fulfill for someone else. Lots of people have Dear Creator Letters, Fandom Wish List posts from other challenges, and other such posts that readily list their fandom wishes (and if you’d like take this opportunity to create one for yourself now, please do!).

Maybe your new friend has a New Year’s goal post with some fannish wishes tucked therein. Maybe someone would love to find new readers for their fic, some fanart to accompany that WIP they’ve been working on, new icons, paid time for their journal or community page … the ideas are endless. You can choose to sign your name to the granted wish or you can gift someone their wish list item anonymously. What’s important is knowing that you yourself did something to make someone’s day a little bit brighter.

I like to think of it as a bit of a fannish scavenger hunt. Look at other people's profiles and find interests that you share. Check back to this post later and see if any interesting wishes were granted!

This is a lovely challenge, and I feel bad I can’t really participate at the moment. Vacation is coming up and with that very limited computer time. Hopefully, I can return to this challenge after summer.

So it feels a bit awkward to mention my wishlist, but here goes; fanart on any of my fics are always welcome. And comments! I adore comments, even the one-word kind. :)

My fics on AO3

Most of us here have at least one movie/book/tv series/comic book/and more that speaks to us on a special level. Here is your opportunity to wax poetic on those things!

We want to hear what new canons to investigate. Tell us why that thing is cool. Tell us why you enjoy it so much. Tell us where to start if we want to get into it too (and how to find it if it’s not something mainstream that’s easy to find everywhere). It can be difficult to find fandom friends with shared interests sometimes, but this is your chance to cultivate a shared interest!

I’m hopelessly multi-fannish, so at any given time I have feels for several fandoms at once. I never really know what will make me feel fannish, but the fandoms are almost always historical or fantastical. Or both at the same time! I have written fanfics for all the fandoms I mention, apart from Deadwood, because I feel I can’t make the language of that show justice.

I list the fandom in alphabetical order for convenience. There are no spoilers below the cuts, they are just there to not clutter up my f-list too much with a very long post.

( All About Eve )

( Deadwood )

( Doctor Who )

( The Historian )

( Ivanhoe )

( Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell )

( The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel )

( The Mummy )

( Penny Dreadful )

( Versailles )

I’ve had an online presence since 1999, but when I started to write fanfic I didn’t want to use the nicks I already have. To start writing was an overwhelming experience for me, and I suddenly found myself writing some rather disturbing things, and I didn’t want the online friends I had to know what I did. At the time I was very good at putting different parts of my life in separate boxes, with lots of space in between. Just the thought of overlap between my boxes was enough to trigger panic attacks. Not to mention if any of my online personalities would be connected to my real life.

So I created an LJ called dancingsalome for discussing things I feel I couldn’t talk about with my other friends and posted my fanfics on comms. The name was not picked on random. I’m a huge fan of Rita Hayworth, an as a small child my mother gave me her movie star trading card collection. The most beautiful and precious one to me was a picture of Rita Hayworth as Salome. This one, to be, exact, only in colour.

I’m also a fan of Oscar Wilde and his play Salome is an old favourite.

Eventually, I started to post my fics to various fanfic archives, and the nick Dancingsalome followed me there, and I use the picture above as an avatar on AO3. About the same time, I realised that posting fics directly to comms was a bit cumbersome, and I decided to start a journal solely for fanfic. I can’t really remember why- probably because not all my LJ friends was into fanfic, and I didn’t want to clutter up their feeds. But a large part was due to those separate boxes. At this point in time I was also writing a lot- constantly writing fics, and also a lot of other posts- So another LJ was born; scripsi, and it later followed mere here to DW. It’s Latin for “I write”.

And a few years passed, and for a number of reasons I stopped writing personal posts on LJ, and almost completely stopped writing fanfic, producing perhaps a fic ever twelve months, or so. Until late 2014 when I suddenly started to write at a steady pace again. At this point, almost all of old friends on dancingsalome had drifted away, so I just posted my fanfic on scripsi. Little by little, I found new fandom friends and more and more personal posts were written and posted on scripsi too. Now I have a much more relaxed attitude on letting various aspects of me mingle online, and even if they are kept to access only I can even post a picture of myself on occasion.

I choose my default icon, and the only icon I really use nowadays, because I feel like that most of the time. I have a lot of responsibilities in my life, and I know that people who meet me in person often think I’m rather reserved and strict.

English is not my first language, but when I started to write fanfic I didn’t know where I could find people to interact with if I kept to my native Swedish. I’ve studied English at university, so It wasn’t so strange to write in it, and writing so much has definitely made my grasp of English much better. I spend a lot of time editing my fics to try to make sure there are as few mistakes as possible, but I’m a bit more relaxed about it when I write ordinary posts.

And if you have any questions I’d be happy to answer them!

I like snowflakes, and I like sunshine too, so let’s play!

1. Transformative Works Policies

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. And now it’s done! I’ve updated my profile page here and on AO3 and Teaspoon.

Transformative Works Policies: If you want to remix, make fanart, icons, or a podfic, feel free to do so without asking, but I would love to know that you have done it and where I can find it.

2. Friending Policy

Is stated on my profile. I always reciprocate, matching the level of friending, i-e. I only give access to people who do the same to me. As for random comments; go ahead. :)

3. Interests + About Me

I have interests and a little about me on my profile page. At the moment I don’t have a sticky-post, but I’m thinking of making one. All my fannish posts are open, access-locked posts are only those which deals with my personal life. And, now, prompted by this challenge, I also have a sticky post.

4. Master Lists

It’s a good idea and I’m going to make one. But as I have written over a hundred fics it will take a little time to finish it.

5. Post Tags

I always tag. Private posts usually just get “life”, fanfics get tagged with fandom and characters. And so on.

6. Current Icons

Once upon a time on LJ I had a lot of icons and changed according to mood or which fandom I posted about. Nowadays I just use the ones you see here. It sums me up pretty well.

7. Sidebar + Profile Links
Yup, I have links both on my profile page and my sticky post.