Just remember, you asked me to tell you these things.
So, many folks have been all short and to the point and concise and stuff. Me, it's going to be not so much like that. Like, at all.
How long have you been creating fan art or writing fan fiction?
This question has multiple answers. I have been writing fanfic since very long before I knew other people did (possibly involving such characters as Fern Avery, Heidi's friend Clara, Clarence the bicycle-riding Knight, Louis the Swan, the Borrowers...). However, then I stopped because it was clear to me I was a weirdo and I dunno if you know, but kids are sensitive about being weirdos. Then, maybe 20 years ago, I started again. Total drawer-fic, and SO stereotypically, involving Trek characters. Then I had kids and thought maybe I was supposed to be a grownup or something, so I stopped again. I still didn't know other people did this. THEN, in 2003, I found out about other people writing fanfic (other than the stuff that actually gets published as licensed stuff in certain fandoms), found LJ and ff.net and OMG OTHER WEIRDOS!! WHO ARE GROWNUPS!!! And I was perfectly happy to recommence. I care less these days about being a weirdo.
So then I wrote mostly HP stuff and some other stuff for a long time. Recently I'm more writing nu!Trek and still some HP and I'm more inclined to dabble all over.
So I guess the short answer is, you know, a long time, or a longer time.
What drew you into fandom in the first place?
Characters? Fans? People? I dunno. OTHER WEIRDOS.
Best thing about SGA fandom: go!
Uh. The AUs, maybe? I'm really not good at choosing, but I guess that's sort of something that stands out as a peculiarly-common thing in this fandom. I also like that there's a fair amount of commentary about ways in which the source material has problems, but it's commentary made by people who continue to feel the love.
Are you a fandom monogamist or do you participate in other fandoms? Which ones?
I am probably the least monogamous fannish person ever. I have written smut involving marshmallow peeps (the sparkly sugar-covered marshmallow birds sold in the US around about Easter). I have written crossovers involving Elmo the Muppet and Neville Longbottom. I have written fic in which Huck Finn determines masturbation is fun, and fic in which Shrek and Fiona have kinky sex (hint: there's no mud, and everything smells clean). I love cracked-out premises taken seriously (that is, the concept is at heart completely absurd, but the resulting story follows rationally from it?) and will happily write such a thing in anything I think I can handle the voices for. I also love many kinds of characters and writing about them and their pasts and their futures and their alternate realities.
I will read in, I dunno, about a millionty fandoms. I write in somewhat fewer (half a millionty? Three quarters?) only because I don't know that I can do a particular setting or character justice. For instance, I am happy to read White Collar fic, but am not prepared to try to write it because heists are hard. Or, like, I don't think I could write Castle though maybe I'm finding some rhythm there.
I am also utterly multishipperous and have very, very few OTP-ish tendencies. Most characters that I write very often probably have been written in at least two or three or thirty different relationships. This is certainly a function of my general inability to choose, and while I think there's relatively a fair amount of text to support Sheppard/McKay, I'd be perfectly happy to read either of them with any of a dozen other characters.
Best thing about McKay/Sheppard: go!
Their brains. Their team. Their faith in each other. The fact that Rodney will show up in a terrible old-man sweater to bring John home. The fact that when Rodney's memory is falling apart, he shows up at John's door.
...John's triceps. What.
Why did you decide to participate in McShep Match?
I...don't know? It's pretty out of character for me, because I have big honking issues about fannish competitions, but I just felt that I wanted to.
And how did you choose Team Work/Play?
This one, I can answer! Playing is always better than working.
Best thing about your contribution to this year's Match: go! (Remember to keep your answer vague, please!)
And now we return to the Flora Is Bad At Choosing thing. Ummmm.
Where can interested readers/viewers find more of your work?
My LJ, or sometimes my Dreamwidth account. Some stuff is at AO3, but I'm a lazy archivist. I have a fic website, linked on the LJ. If you are looking for some of the more outlandish fandoms, you might have to ask me for links, though, because I'm also a pretty lazy tagger. :D
A word to our sponsors?
Roasted beets (which are delicious beyond the telling) are undervalued in contemporary American cuisine. I do not know why it's so hard to find fresh beets in the store, nor why people don't eat them regularly.
....and, bonus questions my teammates asked:
What episode from one of your favorite shows (other than SGA, of course ;) would you love to have seen translated into a SGA episode, and why (or how would the episode have played out--briefly explain)?
Dude, the amount of choosing required here is paralyzing, and also my capacity to recall titles of specific episodes is possibly less evolved than that of your average squirrel. However, since choosing from anything contemporary is too confounding here (CSI: Atlantis! Underwater NCIS! The SGA team going all Robin Hood a la Leverage!), I will say the episode "Arena" from Trek TOS. In which John, in his efforts to defeat an uncommunicative lizard, builds a low-tech cannon out of found materials while Rodney screams at the monitor about how a bamboo tube cannot possibly contain that explosion and also chemistry is perhaps not totally unforgiving of imprecision, but measurements in handfuls and scraped up piles are just asking for trouble.
When John daydreams--where does he see himself and Rodney in the future? Still on Atlantis? In a small house by the sea? Rodney hard at work in some lab and John the playboy hubby?
I fear John may not allow himself to daydream about a happy future. I mean, I imagine he'd deny being hugely superstitious, but I think maybe he feels like imagining a future he doesn't deserve (in his mind) is tempting fate. So, I suppose he has like happy fantasy moments in which he gets to fly things and hunt down bad guys and take care of his own, but he probably carefully seeds into them ways in which everything falls apart, because life is fucked up and people shoot at you and there are bad people, and then you still have to keep living.
What is your favorite McShep piece you've created and why?
This is a funny question because my sum total of fics and ficlets in this fandom is like seven things because my Rodney voice just keeps ranting about things, and my John one is ...he has what you might call issues. I think he has to store his winter issues under the bed in the summer because there's no room to keep them all out all the time.
However, and entertainingly when I went to find this fic, I learned it had somehow vanished so I had to reconstitute it; thank goodness for gmail remembering everything--I think this one, which I wrote in response to the ruckus last summer about a leaked SGU story regarding using the whatsit stones to bodyswap, and a character using another character's body in a really unapproved way. It's not smutty, but it's shippy.
How long have you been creating fan art or writing fan fiction?
This question has multiple answers. I have been writing fanfic since very long before I knew other people did (possibly involving such characters as Fern Avery, Heidi's friend Clara, Clarence the bicycle-riding Knight, Louis the Swan, the Borrowers...). However, then I stopped because it was clear to me I was a weirdo and I dunno if you know, but kids are sensitive about being weirdos. Then, maybe 20 years ago, I started again. Total drawer-fic, and SO stereotypically, involving Trek characters. Then I had kids and thought maybe I was supposed to be a grownup or something, so I stopped again. I still didn't know other people did this. THEN, in 2003, I found out about other people writing fanfic (other than the stuff that actually gets published as licensed stuff in certain fandoms), found LJ and ff.net and OMG OTHER WEIRDOS!! WHO ARE GROWNUPS!!! And I was perfectly happy to recommence. I care less these days about being a weirdo.
So then I wrote mostly HP stuff and some other stuff for a long time. Recently I'm more writing nu!Trek and still some HP and I'm more inclined to dabble all over.
So I guess the short answer is, you know, a long time, or a longer time.
What drew you into fandom in the first place?
Characters? Fans? People? I dunno. OTHER WEIRDOS.
Best thing about SGA fandom: go!
Uh. The AUs, maybe? I'm really not good at choosing, but I guess that's sort of something that stands out as a peculiarly-common thing in this fandom. I also like that there's a fair amount of commentary about ways in which the source material has problems, but it's commentary made by people who continue to feel the love.
Are you a fandom monogamist or do you participate in other fandoms? Which ones?
I am probably the least monogamous fannish person ever. I have written smut involving marshmallow peeps (the sparkly sugar-covered marshmallow birds sold in the US around about Easter). I have written crossovers involving Elmo the Muppet and Neville Longbottom. I have written fic in which Huck Finn determines masturbation is fun, and fic in which Shrek and Fiona have kinky sex (hint: there's no mud, and everything smells clean). I love cracked-out premises taken seriously (that is, the concept is at heart completely absurd, but the resulting story follows rationally from it?) and will happily write such a thing in anything I think I can handle the voices for. I also love many kinds of characters and writing about them and their pasts and their futures and their alternate realities.
I will read in, I dunno, about a millionty fandoms. I write in somewhat fewer (half a millionty? Three quarters?) only because I don't know that I can do a particular setting or character justice. For instance, I am happy to read White Collar fic, but am not prepared to try to write it because heists are hard. Or, like, I don't think I could write Castle though maybe I'm finding some rhythm there.
I am also utterly multishipperous and have very, very few OTP-ish tendencies. Most characters that I write very often probably have been written in at least two or three or thirty different relationships. This is certainly a function of my general inability to choose, and while I think there's relatively a fair amount of text to support Sheppard/McKay, I'd be perfectly happy to read either of them with any of a dozen other characters.
Best thing about McKay/Sheppard: go!
Their brains. Their team. Their faith in each other. The fact that Rodney will show up in a terrible old-man sweater to bring John home. The fact that when Rodney's memory is falling apart, he shows up at John's door.
...John's triceps. What.
Why did you decide to participate in McShep Match?
I...don't know? It's pretty out of character for me, because I have big honking issues about fannish competitions, but I just felt that I wanted to.
And how did you choose Team Work/Play?
This one, I can answer! Playing is always better than working.
Best thing about your contribution to this year's Match: go! (Remember to keep your answer vague, please!)
And now we return to the Flora Is Bad At Choosing thing. Ummmm.
Where can interested readers/viewers find more of your work?
My LJ, or sometimes my Dreamwidth account. Some stuff is at AO3, but I'm a lazy archivist. I have a fic website, linked on the LJ. If you are looking for some of the more outlandish fandoms, you might have to ask me for links, though, because I'm also a pretty lazy tagger. :D
A word to our sponsors?
Roasted beets (which are delicious beyond the telling) are undervalued in contemporary American cuisine. I do not know why it's so hard to find fresh beets in the store, nor why people don't eat them regularly.
....and, bonus questions my teammates asked:
What episode from one of your favorite shows (other than SGA, of course ;) would you love to have seen translated into a SGA episode, and why (or how would the episode have played out--briefly explain)?
Dude, the amount of choosing required here is paralyzing, and also my capacity to recall titles of specific episodes is possibly less evolved than that of your average squirrel. However, since choosing from anything contemporary is too confounding here (CSI: Atlantis! Underwater NCIS! The SGA team going all Robin Hood a la Leverage!), I will say the episode "Arena" from Trek TOS. In which John, in his efforts to defeat an uncommunicative lizard, builds a low-tech cannon out of found materials while Rodney screams at the monitor about how a bamboo tube cannot possibly contain that explosion and also chemistry is perhaps not totally unforgiving of imprecision, but measurements in handfuls and scraped up piles are just asking for trouble.
When John daydreams--where does he see himself and Rodney in the future? Still on Atlantis? In a small house by the sea? Rodney hard at work in some lab and John the playboy hubby?
I fear John may not allow himself to daydream about a happy future. I mean, I imagine he'd deny being hugely superstitious, but I think maybe he feels like imagining a future he doesn't deserve (in his mind) is tempting fate. So, I suppose he has like happy fantasy moments in which he gets to fly things and hunt down bad guys and take care of his own, but he probably carefully seeds into them ways in which everything falls apart, because life is fucked up and people shoot at you and there are bad people, and then you still have to keep living.
What is your favorite McShep piece you've created and why?
This is a funny question because my sum total of fics and ficlets in this fandom is like seven things because my Rodney voice just keeps ranting about things, and my John one is ...he has what you might call issues. I think he has to store his winter issues under the bed in the summer because there's no room to keep them all out all the time.
However, and entertainingly when I went to find this fic, I learned it had somehow vanished so I had to reconstitute it; thank goodness for gmail remembering everything--I think this one, which I wrote in response to the ruckus last summer about a leaked SGU story regarding using the whatsit stones to bodyswap, and a character using another character's body in a really unapproved way. It's not smutty, but it's shippy.