A new year and a look back: 12 months on LiveJournal.

[bironic]

Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of my first post. Tonight heralds the start of autumn and the commencement of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. (A very happy New Year to those who are observing.) Altogether a good time for a little recap. There was going to be a bunch of ficlets to celebrate, but they're not done yet, so it'll just be this navel-gazing for now.

This year on LJ, I:

• Learned how to craft posts that weren't bloated with two or three posts' worth of information. (This one is my favorite cringe-worthy example.)
• Discovered the joy of giving and receiving feedback.
• Fell hard into House fandom and became part of an online community for the first time instead of watching from the outskirts or participating mainly in conferences/conventions.
• Posted five pieces of fanfiction in two fandoms, totalling 19,700 words (with another 4,000 of Spike story and 1,400 of ficlets on my computer getting worked on). Have been thrilled to see several of them Memory'd and included on people's fic rec lists.
• Held a month-long Memoryfest (friends-locked).
• Hosted a birthday talk-about-your-usernames festival. (Still open! Drop in if you haven't yet.)
• Befriended people I've never met and didn't have plans to meet.
• From an initial list of six or seven friends, became "friend of" 56 people/communities (!), 54 of which are legitimate and 20 of whom I know in real life. Also known as the discovery of the golden rule, Create and Ye Shall Be Friended.
• Wrote 176 posts, including reviews for 26+ movies, two plays, half a dozen ballets, nine books, and a lot of episodes of House. May I take a moment to apologize again to all the Harry Potter people who've put up with that last?
• Found out exactly how much LiveJournal eats one's life.

Top Commenters on bironic's LiveJournal

1	kabale	140
2	catilinarian	130
3	daasgrrl	66
4	maddy_harrigan	56
5	michelle_nine	42
6	synn	37
7	firestorm717	31
8	musicisbelievng	21
9	captain_tulip	20
10	thewlisian_afer	19

11	usomitai	18
12	secondsilk	17
13	pynelyf	15
14	thirdblindmouse	14
15	crazypalefreak	11
16	mateo10	10
17	bethctg	8
18	elynross	7
19	pun	6
20	gingergirl1977	6
21	lysa1	6
22	simple__man	5
23	fallen_arazil	5
24	alisel_kat	5
25	elanor_isolda	5
26	renoir_girl	4
27	mistressofmagik	4
28	leaper182	4
29	ryokophoenix	4
30	swatkat24	4
31	descrime	4
32	hawkeyecat	4
33	krippity	3
34	nakannalee	3
35	shoedog	3
36	wildelamassu	3
37	a_to_zita	3
38	chiana606	3
39	imsanehonest	3
40	m_butterfly	2
41	stephantom	2
42	rubberbutton	2
43	evila_elf	2
44	bitter_crimson	2
45	annephoenix	2
46	tathren	2
47	chicating	2
48	topaz_eyes	2
49	amazonqueenkate	2
50	qween_tartii	2
51	jakob_sinister	2
52	supersaps	2

Total Commenters: 102 (47 not shown)
Total Comments: 1,477
Report generated 9/22/2006 10:02:44 PM by scrapdog's LJ Comment Stats Wizard 1.7

(I've excised all the one-comment-ers. It's too bad this doesn't take into account comments on my posts in other communities.) Not surprising that six of the top ten are people I know personally, including a sister and some very good friends. kabale still holds the top spot after enthusiastic participation in the Memoryfest. daasgrrl, my goodness, you've shot up quickly. thewlisian_afer, I like how we hold parallel spots in each other's graphs.

Next year on LJ, I hope to:

• Hold another Memoryfest for all and sundry, probably in January.
• Meet some of you lovelies who live within driving distance, and perhaps some who don't.
• Improve my commenting skills so I can say in one paragraph what it now takes four to cover.
• Write more.

And in that vein, it's time to work on those ficlets.

In the meantime, TELL ME on this day of reflection: How has LiveJournal affected your life? (How) have you changed your posting style since starting? Did you make promises to yourself that you've kept or broken? Etc. Fellow LJ addict wants to know.

Comments

[nightdog-barks.livejournal.com]

L'shanah tovah, bironic.

How has LiveJournal affected your life?

I think in two main ways -- I've gotten to know people I never would've met in RL -- folks in the UK, in France, Australia, Canada (lots of Canadians, for some reason!), Singapore, Switzerland ... the list goes on and on. And they're all "real people", even though I've never met them and I'm not likely to EVER meet them. I know more about some of these people than I know about my own relatives. Whether this is a good thing or bad remains to be seen.

Also. I've learned I can write. And apparently it's not too bad (I say it this way because I have a permanent inferiority complex ingrained in my personality). I still have trouble believing that I can make stuff up, write it down, and complete strangers like it enough to leave comments on it. That's just ... amazing to me. I am perplexed and have trouble believing it all just won't suddenly go away.

(How) have you changed your posting style since starting?

I think lately my personal posts have become shorter because I've been writing more.

Did you make promises to yourself that you've kept or broken?

Not that I know of.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Thank you, and to you and your husband as well. May you have a sweet and healthy year filled with joy and lots of good fic (if that's not redundant).

I've gotten to know people I never would've met in RL ... And they're all "real people", even though I've never met them and I'm not likely to EVER meet them.

Oh, yes. I've definitely experienced a similar thing, though not because of LiveJournal, but rather because of fandom in general. After reading fanfic and lurking for several years, I started actively participating through the conference/convention scene, which often involved chatting with people online months before we met in person. To get into detail would entail a huge post, but suffice it to say that I've made some very cool friends through fandom who live all over the place too, and that's given me the excuse to travel to places like London and Copenhagen (this summer) to visit them. That positive experience does make me want to try to meet some LJ friends at some point in the future, no matter how far away they may live.

Also. I've learned I can write. And apparently it's not too bad ... I still have trouble believing that I can make stuff up, write it down, and complete strangers like it enough to leave comments on it.

See, that's cool. I've thought of myself as a writer since maybe the age of nine, took all the English electives in high school and then went and got two writing-related degrees and now work partly as a writer, so it's always fascinating to me to hear stories about how people -- not kids, that's a different story -- found this hidden talent through fanfic. And feedback can be a wonderful confidence-booster that affects you outside of LJ, don't you think? Even if that ingrained insecurity whispers reasons why you shouldn't take all praise at face value.

What I've found most amazing about the LJ/fanfic scene is, for the first time in my life, being able to write and share the sort of stories the majority of my acquaintances balked at when I wrote them while I was growing up, including the very idea of fanfiction, which they didn't understand, not to mention explicit and/or "twisted" stories, which I now know are NC-17/Mature and non-con and hurt/comfort, etc. Here nobody blinks at it. Other people write and share it. We comment about each other's work with respect. It's like heaven.

I think lately my personal posts have become shorter because I've been writing more.

My personal posts have definitely decreased in frequency since joining House fandom, or rather since people started friending me for my fannish stuff. Which is fine; I started this blog for that sort of thing, not for taking the place of my own paper journal.

Thank you for commenting! And, jeez, for reading all this.