antuhsa | Snowflake Challenge - Days 4 & 5 (Reply)

And the Snowflake Challenge continues! I'm combining two days into one post again. Day 4 doesn't actually require a post, but I'd like to write a short evaluation of my experiences with it anyway.

Day 4

Comment to someone you haven’t ever interacted with before or introduce yourself to someone you’ve interacted with and friend/ follow them.

This challenge was so much fun. Interacting with people with similar interests is probably my favourite thing about being in fandom. Unfortunately, I’m very shy, so I usually admire other fans from afar and hope that they one day start talking to me, instead of being bold and just sending them a message. This challenge, however, forced me to dust off my courage and go for it. I left comments left and right yesterday, in the journals of friends, acquaintances and strangers. It was surprisingly easy to do (though I will admit that having the challenge as an ‘excuse’ helped a lot) and I enjoyed it very much. I will make a point of doing it more often from now on.

Day 5

In your own space, promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them.

This challenge caught me by surprise, so it took me a while to come up with three recs. Not that aren't plenty of communities etc. that I love, but I wanted to promote ones that don't have a presence in the journals. Because if they do, I'm a member of them and they show up on my profile where everyone can see them. I feel that that is already a kind of promotion on its own, so I'm going to put different ones in the spotlight today.

The first one is my go-to writing blog: Helping Writers Become Authors. It's one of the first blogs I found when I became interested in writing and needed advice. It's still the first plce I visit when I want to know more about any writing related topic. The advice on this blog is so solid. The woman behind the blog is an author herself and has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about her craft. She has a very clear writing style that makes her posts easy to follow. I also love how she doesn't shy away from difficult topics like 'how to write character chemistry'. The only 'problem' (for lack of a better word) I have with it is that she is very structured in her writing and approaches everything logically, which is something that I, as a chaotic pantser, can't always relate to. I still love the blog, however, and it always succeeds in making writing seem less daunting and mysterious to me.

The second one is a community that I'm actually not a part of anymore, and that's the HP SlashFic Subreddit. I found it by accident about a year ago when I was searching for something slash related, and became hooked by the interesting meta discussions there. I didn't know any other places for those kind of conversations then, so I joined and ended up having a great time. I especially loved reading

perverse_idyll's wonderful meta and was always looking forwards to the monthly 'what have you read last month?' convo's. I enjoyed keeping track of what I read and taking notes to use in my response, which required me to approach my reading in a different way than what I was used to. But, most importantly, this subreddit is where I met the lovely

williamsnickers ^^. Our crazy long comment conversations were often the highlight of my month and I'm so glad the Subreddit was easygoing enough that I could make a new friend! I myself have now deleted my reddit account and taken the conversations with the people that mattered the most elsewhere, because I felt that I had got everything out of the platform that I wanted, but I still have very fond memories of my time there.

The third one is Potions and Snitches, a fanfic archive for Snape & Harry gen. I love the fact that this one is still reasonably active and hope it will continue to do so! It's a fun, oldschool place, with some Snape & Harry meta and the ocassional challenge. I haven't had the time to really delve into it yet, but I'm looking forwards to checking out the fics. Even though I call myself a Snarry shipper, I'm in essence only interested in seeing Snape and Harry interact; it doesn't matter to me if that is sexual or not. In fact, I often find sexual/ romantic Snarry to be somewhat disappointing, because those fics tend to soften Snape almost beyond recognition, which takes a lot of the enjoyment I otherwise find in the pairing away from me. I'm very curious to see how platonic Snarry fics portray the characters. The few I've already seen seemed promising!