stuttermoan

Just messing around and setting this up. Got my stuff moved over. Scrolling down the LJ friends feed and friending people who still post. Hi!

Hi there. Hope y'all are well. I went through some rough shit (both medical and emotional) at the end of last year, but things are looking up for me now. Anyway.

1) If you're scrolling past this, leave me HP poetry prompts! Single characters or pairings, anything else that strikes your fancy, as many as you want. I've been feeling like trying my hand at sonnets recently, so let's get this party started.

2) Here's a brilliant comment from an interesting thread about Snape as a character who many find hard to like. I'm so glad her comment got gilded, because it kicked ass. I wonder if she's in fandom. I should ask.

3) Still posting once a day on my fandom tumblr. Also, here's my non-fannish tumblr. I wish someone would make a website combining the functionality of livejournal with the content of tumblr, but alas, they seem at odds culturally. Different demographics, I guess.

Huzzah! I made my Camp NaNoWriMo wordcount goal with a couple days to spare. Too bad my cabin couldn't hack it. Now that I got that done, I'm going to finish a fic (!) I started in June and possibly do some Harry-Potter-themed printmaking. Feeling pretty accomplished, y'all.

Just finished HBP again, and I have a hypothesis that never occurred to me before: Snape made the Felix Felicis that Harry won from Slughorn.

When Harry goes into Slughorn's classroom for the first time, there's a cauldron of Felix Felicis, which he wins (with help from Snape's textbook notes, though he doesn't know it at the time). We know from what Slughorn told Dumbledore and Harry over the summer, that Slughorn has been on the run for a year. And we know from Hermione's research on Felix Felicis that it takes 6 months to stew. Slughorn wouldn't have had time to brew liquid luck in the year he was living in other people's houses. Even if he had time to start it, who trundles around a potion in progress?

The only hitch in my guess is that JKR has stated that only Filch stays in the castle over the summer months. I would assume Snape could have a place to make potions in his house, or he made the Felix during the previous term and stored it at the school and Slughorn pulled it out of the school's potion storage for show. Or maybe Snape completed most of the potion-making steps the previous year and the "stewing" part that occurred during the 6 months was magically constant enough that it didn't need to be monitored over the summer. Of course, assuming Felix Felicis is a potion that can't go bad over time, Slughorn could have just pulled a ton of vials from his own suitcases and filled up a cauldron with it to make an impression on his students.

Still, I find my completely unsupported Snape idea to be cooler because if it's true, Snape had an even bigger part in the events of HBP than we knew. Between the textbook and Felix, Snape was saving Harry's ass all year long.

So I made an account at Fanlore to contribute what I could and fill out my user page. I'm not sure what the deal is with the website itself, but it seems incredibly slow to load. I've done a small amount of minor contributing on wikipedia (we're talkin' punctuation, here), so hopefully the mechanics are relatively the same.

I found some old scraps of attempted fic I saved in private posts here, years ago. Might be worth doing something with. Also, I intend to continue the list of astrological analyses, with the next one being Dobby on June 28.

On May 10, I discovered two of my poems, "Safety in Unwanted Things" and "Keep You" had been plagiarized. I found out when I googled "safety in unwanted things" and a Google Book result popped up. After freaking out for roughly an hour, I emailed the publisher, who responded back quickly that he would be pulling the book, and was considering allowing the author another chance to republish with the stolen work removed.

On May 11, it occurred to me to do searches for other poems within the book, and I discovered that technophile had also been plagiarized. I commented here about it (using my non-fandom journal, aquaviann). I also found out that my_little_death had been plagiarized, and let her know as well. I updated the publisher on the growing list of lifted poems.

technophile, after discovering several more plagiarized pieces, organized those links and spread the word here and here.

On May 12, the publisher emailed me again, stating that the evidence had made him decide against giving her the chance to republish. A few hours later, he forwarded me an apology from the plagiarist, and a few hours after that, she emailed me an apology herself. She also apologized to technophile in a comment.

Factually, that was pretty much the whole thing. Emotionally, it was WAY more than that, and I'm still sorting it out. I have been plagiarized once before by some goof on deviantart, but something about the fact that my work was put into a physical volume really got to me. I've spent the last year of my life (Spring 2011 to Spring 2012) working on counseling practicum, getting married, and learning the ins and outs of stepmomhood. I've given HP fandom the occasional thought, but have been too busy to do anything but skim over my friends list. My fandom involvement pretty much peaked in 2006, and I fear that my poetry peaked then, too. Looking back has given me perspective on my improvement, and also on my relative stagnation since then. I'm afraid my life will drown out my progress as a writer, and I'll never get to go further with my work.

All of that had been lingering in my mind for a while when I found my poems in someone else's book, under someone else's name. Even though it was a small publication company and very few copies were printed, it still really gave me a kick in the ass. I guess, overall, I should take from this an urgency to get myself back into writing poetry, no matter how complicated my schedule is. After all, J.K. Rowling had kids, money problems, and lots of real-life crap to contend with before and during the process of writing the HP series. If it takes plagiarism to get me movin', so be it. I've got writing to do!

Tumblrs...about Watchmen. Yep.

Analyzing Rorschach - Because this dude is all over the DSM.

Texts From the Owlship - A brilliant combo of Watchmen panels and Texts from Last Night

Fuck Yeah, Watchmen - Speaks for itself.

I saw a midnight showing/double feature of DH:1 and DH:2 with three of my HP-loving cousins. The DH:1 was nice to see on the big screen again, and DH:2 was phenomenal. I'm glad to see that the Snape/McGonagall duel was left in the movie, because it was about time McG got to have a really badass scene.

This last movie reminds me that I've strayed pretty far from my fandom devotion of several years ago. My life has changed dramatically, and I don't have the spare time I once did. I live with my fiance and his son, so my alone time has been reduced significantly as well. I feel that I have benefited from fandom involvement, and written some damn good poetry in the process.

In a way, the final movie is a reminder to me that my fandom-devoted time has passed. I still love the books like nothing else, but reading fic and writing fannish things is something I probably won't do much anymore, at least not until my spare time picks up again after I get my master's degree. Even then, I may be more focused on trying to do my own writing to do as much fannish stuff.

I wasn't young enough to enjoy the series during my childhood, but it was a lifeline for me in a time of my early adulthood. In times where I was alone, I didn't feel alienated. Something about this series moved me (still does) and I poured my time and energy into it. It was an effective sublimation, a real-world case of self-directed bibliotherapy. In the existential sense, I'm glad J.K. Rowling brought the series into being, for the sake of all the folks who get something lasting from it.

Today, while cleaning my room, I found a box of cards from the Harry Potter Trading Card Game. I remember finding them in a store a few years ago and buying them with the intention of scanning images. Here are a few with particularly interesting character depictions.

( HP:TCG scans: Snape, Lily, Trio, Dursleys, Percy, Scabbers )

HP-themed Overheard in New York! Yay!

This one is effin' poetry:

Chick on cell: Look, there are only two people other than me who can construct a sentence that awesome: Severus Snape and Keith Olbermann, and one of them isn't even real!