Exit Life Through Window

I don't feel like I'm quite finished working out what my goals are for this year, but some things are already clear to me. Firstly, I'm going back to my system of basing my personal goals around three areas: Creative/Thinking things, Fitness things, and Service things. I read somewhere once that the people who report the most satisfaction and contentment in their lives are people who are active in all three of those areas, and ever since then I've tried to make sure I'm always doing a mix of all three.

( Goals behind the cut )

So those are my thoughts so far... we'll see how well I'll stick to them. I might try and make a monthly post to track how I'm doing, as a way of reminding myself of all the fun things I want to do. The biggest challenge for me is making sure I have enough time for these things by not allowing work to take over my life and eat up my evenings, so I need to be really strict this year about leaving work at work. Fingers crossed, I can make it work!

Doing the snowflake_challenge for the first time is really interesting, because it's making me think about things I haven't considered in a long time! For example, my history in fandom.

I started out in message boards for the soap opera Neighbours in about 2001, weirdly enough. That's where I first encountered fanfic and where I wrote and posted my first fics. From there, I found my way to ff.net and began to realise that there was fic out there for other things I loved too... and fell headfirst into HP fandom. I made an account and joined the forums at Fiction Alley as well as various other HP message boards, and started writing my own HP fics - mostly the first chapters of really terrible crossovers that I never finished xD

By about 2004, I'd pretty much left Neighbours fandom, and started my LJ account, which started out as a place for me to word-dump teenage angst. Then I discovered comms, and started making friends with other fen. I lurked a lot in Fandom Wank and various other places, took part in some LJ-based HP exchanges, met LJ friends offline for the first time, and read pretty much every HP longfic I could get my hands on - including quite a few that I definitely wasn't supposed to be reading.

In 2006 I discovered yuletidetreasure.org for the first time and started reading through the archives, and in 2007 I took part in Yuletide for the first time (I wrote fic for 10 Things I Hate About You!) That pretty much coincided with a gradual shift away from HP-centric fandom and towards more multi-fannish activity for me. I discovered Twisting the Hellmouth and worked my way through all the BtVS, LotR, Stargate, Star Wars, Charmed, etc etc etc fic there and on ff.net.

I didn't leave HP fandom altogether, though, and in 2010ish I joined the LJ comm Hogwarts is Home, where I met a bunch of very awesome people. That was really one of the best periods of time for me on LJ, because it meant I once again had a super active f-list, and a reason to post more as well. It also got me back into writing fic more!

As tumblr began to take off and LJ got crappier (for so many reasons, *sigh*), I joined tumblr and made a DW, although I stayed LJ-based for a really long time. Because my flist became so quiet, I got out of the habit of posting, and basically only used it for exchange letters for a really long time. (That, and grad school ate my free time!). I never really got into posting on tumblr (beyond reblogging), because I didn't like how public it felt. Offline, I got into a bunch of new fandoms, especially video game fandoms like Uncharted, Persona 3 and 4, and Journey, plus then eventually Dangan Ronpa and The Witcher. And started playing FFXIV late in 2019, which is my first MMORPG experience!

Which brings us up to now! Having finished grad school last year, I finally have time to be more active again in fandom. I'm hoping doing this challenge will be a good start with that!