The Ramblings Of A Creature Of Hobbit

So, for the Fannish Housekeeping prompt over at the sunshine challenge, I'm currently in the middle of updating my Dreamwidth, changed the layout to the ginger cat one and currently going through and uploading lots more icons to better reflect my fandoms (yes, Lost will always be my favourite, but I have lots of others now that weren't reflected). That's going to be a work in progress for a while I think, but gonna keep at it.

And it made me realise my old LJ introduction post was a little out of date too so rejigging here:

My name is Helen and I am 42. I live in England although the town where I live is close enough to the Welsh border that people very often think it's actually in Wales. (If you know your My Fair Lady, I'll give you a hint: hurricanes hardly happen here.) No one ever heard of it until our local celebrity (Ellie Goulding, and more recently It's A Sin's Olly Alexander. I actually know one of Ellie Goulding's relatives, but haven't admitted to her that I'm really more a fan of Olly's). However, my family are originally from the north of England (although I'm also quarter-Scottish) so I really feel that I'm from there despite growing up here. Anyone who's ever seen that BBC drama The Village - it's filmed in the village where a lot of my maternal relatives grew up. I've managed to avoid picking up the "Sam from Lord of the Rings" accent that is common here and retain my own "Merry" accent.

I'm closer to Mum's side of the family than Dad's - my parents split up when I was 10 and while my dad was around, my grandad on Mum's side was really the father figure in my life. If you know your Pretty Little Liars, if I say "Hanna", that tells you all you need to know about my relationship with my father and his side of the family. Grandad died in March 2013 and I still miss him every day. Mum is the oldest of three siblings, the middle sibling being Donald who has two children (Stuart and Sarah - I'm close to both my cousins) and Iain (sometimes called Dudley Dursley to his face due to excessive demands for Christmas and birthday presents) whose guinea pigs were the equivalent (he had 2, the obvious happened, he ended up with about 52, it's a family joke. The last one died about 7 years ago and his wife won't let him have any more!). I hardly know a lot of my relatives on Dad's side as they emigrated to Australia about a month before I was born and I haven't met them too many times. We don't have much of a relationship beyond the occasional comment on Facebook which has me questioning if they even read what I said in the first place. If someone asked me ever about my cousins, I'd immediately talk about Stuart and Sarah, but probably not those in Australia. (And I realise that this intro post is really old because it didn't mention the nephews and nieces, Isabella, Fraser, Isla and Angus, or Freddie the bulldog).

I studied English literature at St Andrews from 2000 to 2004. I've been asked this question so many times that I ended up giving people a spiel just to prevent it - no, I didn't know Prince William, who was in the year below me. I did, however, manage to walk past him in the street without realising until my ex's friend shrieked it in my ear. 20 years on, I've still never lived that one down. I get asked a lot less about Kate, and the answer is that I didn't knowingly meet her although if I'd come across her long enough ago that she wasn't well known yet then I wouldn't remember necessarily. I'm sure I've heard it said that you spend the second half of your first year at university avoiding everyone you met in the first half - anyone who knows where it comes from, remind me as I can't remember? I spent my third year avoiding everyone I met in second year (well, with two exceptions) - I always did do things behind the times. But the friends I made in other years are friends for life.

In fact, once you're friends with me, that's usually the case. I am always loyal as a friend and will always try and make sure I keep in touch as much as I can. If anything, there have been times when I really should have walked away but tried to hard to resurrect a friendship that wasn't going anywhere - some of you know that I recently spent three years going back and forwards on this issue with one person before finally realising it wasn't going anywhere and wasn't doing me any good to hang on to it. This has been more difficult an issue for me in the last few years - in October 2012 a friend of mine died very suddenly in an accident and the fact that we hadn't spoken in a while before he died haunted me a lot at the time, and recently I realised it still does to some extent. A few days afterwards I'd seen some article in a newspaper where some guy had been angsting about what his last words with his father would be and he'd come to the conclusion that too much emphasis is placed on last words by society and it's all the other memories that really matter. At the time, I thought it might be my friend's way of letting me know he'd forgiven me. Some of you won't believe that, and that's okay. Sometimes I'm not too sure myself, but it was the only thing that helped me forgive myself at the time and I'd rather have the possibility that it was than the certainty that it wasn't. But anyway, after that I vowed never to lose touch with anyone again. Lately, I've wondered if I was too hard on myself back then. But I still don't cut anyone out of my life unless something serious has happened or it's been a whole accumulation of things that build up to the point where I can't take any more. So if I remove any of you without you removing me first, it isn't deliberate. (I did have this problem a few years ago which LJ insisted I was doing myself, but it hasn't happened for ages now, fingers crossed.)

I have deleted the paragraph about my work totally because at the time of writing the original I had recently been restructured into a different team and had talked about how the move was so much better for me. How little did I know. Although to be fair, that was written in 2014. The woman who was my manager at that time has recently resigned following an investigation after she was reported for bullying, which was justified - I called her Professor Umbridge because her management skills reminded me very much of this Harry Potter character. (To continue the analogy, my and Umbridge's previous manager had "Cornelius Fudge burying head in the sand" tendencies, and I have often wondered if Umbridge was trying so hard not to be Fudge that she went too far in the opposite direction and didn't understand that that in itself was a mistake.) Things went downhill with Umbridge after an argument she had with our grand-boss, which I don't know the whole story of apart from a second hand version of Umbridge's rants about it, but that happened in 2015, a year after that intro post, so at the time of writing she wasn't as bad. Turnover at that job got so bad I used to refer to it as the Defence Against the Dark Arts job (Voldemort was the safer Harry Potter character to blame that on!) About to start working with yet another manager, still very early days and hoping not to get another Harry Potter villain. I'm realising now how much shit I normalised even though it really wasn't, and taking the time to adjust. As for my actual work it involves coordinating Personal Education Plans for children in care, dealing with reports for children with additional needs, some finance work, arranging and minuting meetings, processing nursery funding applications.

Fandoms I am or have been active in are Lost, Fringe, The Vampire Diaries, Pretty Little Liars, Revenge, Doctor Who, Orphan Black, Harry Potter, Being Human UK, Once Upon A Time, The Hunger Games, iZombie, Arrow, Game of Thrones, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, Shadowhunters, Teen Wolf, Scream, How To Get Away With Murder, The Originals, Heroes Reborn, Supernatural, Riverdale, Slasher, American Horror Story, Dead of Summer, Gotham, Shadowhunters, Legacies, Supergirl, Smallville, Merlin, Harper's Island, It's A Sin, Cruel Summer, Elite, Superman and Lois, Batwoman, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Manifest, One Of Us Is Lying, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The A List, The Wilds, Yellowjackets, Dark, School Spirits, 1899, FROM, All American, Red Rose and I have a long list to check out. Those where I haven't been very active beyond making the odd icon are Torchwood, Castle, Lord of the Rings, Lucifer, Buffy and Angel, but I am always up for being more active. Those who know me well will know that I will try writing just about any character once and very often find it more interesting to write about those who are overlooked. Sometimes I've wondered why I choose to do this and questioned whether anyone really cares about such characters, but sometimes I've been surprised by the responses I've had to fics about, for example, Byron Montgomery or Sneezy the dwarf (both real examples).

My favourite authors are Riley Sager, John Marrs, Ruth Ware, Catherine Ryan Howard, JD Robb.

I am morally opposed to Brexit. Having said that, politics aren't a deal breaker for me (if you put my whole family in a room, it would cover the entire spectrum, so if I cut off anyone I disagreed with, I wouldn't have much family interaction). I'm willing to agree to disagree, and there's always something else to talk about anyway.

I love cats, especially gingers.

I am open to any friend requests - just add me and I'll add you back.

Comments on fic are always welcome, even if it's a really old fic (but if it's just to say something like "I hate Character X and I'm glad they're dead" heads up that I don't engage with those). I also give permission to create any work inspired by/based on mine, just as long as you let me know. Icons are all shareable. Requests for fic/icons will be considered although I'm more likely to do something with it if we've interacted prior to this (as long as you're not the Arrowverse troll from 2019 who left rude comments to anyone who didn't do theirs, in which case you can jog on because I wouldn't do one for you on principle.)

My other contact details are as below. People are welcome to add me anywhere as long as you let me know who you are (let's just say there was a snooping situation at Exjob which left me a bit paranoid about who's reading what I post and even though I already did the friends only thing before I even started Exjob and met aforementioned snoop, it just made me more determined to do so).

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/helen.l.gill
Twitter: https://twitter.com/heleng268
Instagram: https://instagram.com/helen260882/
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AO3: http://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/works