La pasticherie de Petra

Challenge #1

The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

Hi, I'm Petra. I'm a writer and avid reader, primarily focused on fanfiction and poetry, who will write damn near anything for a drabble or a limerick at a time in one of my many fandoms, and I currently have a writing offer open here if anyone has any relevant requests they'd like me to entertain.

I am still very stuck on Star Wars, but I have never been monofannish, so if something else on my list pings your brain, by all means, prompt me!

I don't write about my personal life much, so here's the tl;dr -- 40's, they/them pronouns, happily married, happily employed.

I like Snowflake Challenge because early January is dark and miserable in my area, and it helps to have something to look forward to.

snowflake_challenge Day 4: My goal for the coming year is to Be Kind, Have Fun, write when the spirit moves, and sing when the spirit moves.

Day 5: Fandom has improved my life immeasurably. My dearest friends are people I have met through fandom, and they, in turn, have supported me through dark times and bright days, through learning about myself and finding ways to connect with other people. Writing brings me joy, and sharing my writing brings me joy. I have learned a huge amount about people from fans and fandom, both positive and useful. I don't know who I would be if I weren't fannish.

Day 1: Fannish details: I updated my fannish info and my .zip file of all my fanworks, both of which are available both here on Dreamwidth and on my AO3 profile.

Day 2: Fannish history: I first found fandom proper on Usenet under a different name. The first slash I read was Vampire Chronicles, just before Anne Rice burned the fandom to the ground and salted the earth. From VampChron, I wandered sideways into Star Trek slash and fell in love with torch's prose.

After that I fell in love with Star Wars, though I didn't write anything for it under this pseud, and then Les Misérables, where I acquired this pseudonym for the purpose of writing porn.

Everything after that is pretty well documented on my AO3 fanworks listing. Comics, musicals, novels, Six Degrees of Canada. All kinds of fun.

*

I will happily write a More Joy Day limerick to be posted on 1/10/25 for anyone who reads this post and shares at least one fandom with me.

Kindly comment here so all my requests are in one place. Anonymous comments are fine, but please sign it with a name so I know who to dedicate your limerick to.

This is 2/3rds a runpunkrun positivity post, because:

fancake is a multifandom rec community that provides me with a huge amount of reading/watching material. Anyone can post on the month's theme and there are extensive archives.

gluten_free is also wonderful as a trove of recipes.

And not the same runner, or very active anymore, but a huge help in times of trouble, fucking_meds, for when your drugs do something your doctor hasn't warned you about.

I am a writer, though I haven't been writing as much as I would like recently. I keep a series on AO3 for my favorite stories by me. Every time I get a comment on one of them, whether it's DC Comics from 2005 or Good Omens/Car Talk from last year, I get an extra ego boost, because it means I'm right about the stories of mine that I value.

I definitely have themes that I come back to, but I also have a wide range of different stories that I've told over the years. I am proud of the breadth of my work.

My subscribers already know what I'm going to say, but once more for the cheap seats:

Do you like companion animals? Psychic bonds? ____ Made Them Do It? Come write for Psychic Wolves for Lupercalia! If you don't want to read the canon, try this on for size instead.

I'm still trying to get the gumption to work on the Untamed psychic wolf story, which promises to be very long indeed.

Day 3:
Invite someone from your fandom to dinner. This is hard, because I like a layer of separation between myself and the creators, but I'll go with John Rogers, Leverage showrunner, because he seems like a great person to have a conversation with on just about any subject, and I love the way his mind works.

Day 4:
Goal: write the Untamed psychic wolves story I've got brewing, and hopefully something else this year.

Day 5:
Promote a canon: Sweet Mary Starbuck by Alex Sturbaum is stuck in my head today, and I think it would make a great f/f Five Minute Fandom for Yuletide.

Hi, I'm Petra here and petra, and sometimes Petra Lemaitre when it's necessary to specify further, e. g. petralemaitre (99.99% reblogs) and petralemaitre (locked/unused). I've been in fandom since 1997 and slash fandom since 1999. When I fall in love with a fandom, I tend to fall hard and write a lot, but I've always been polyfannish by inclination. Some of my past fandoms are ones I broke up with because something turned me off on them sharply--DCU, hockey RPF, The Magicians--and some are things I still adore where I simply ran out of stories to tell--Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes, Slings & Arrows, due South. Currently I am reading a lot of The Untamed/CQL/MDZS, but I haven't reached the Need to Write phase with anything lately.

I run the Psychic Wolves for Lupercalia challenge, and I'm running it again this year, for all your psychic companion wolves Make Them Do It needs. All fandoms and stories of all ratings are welcome. This year, I'm looking at attempting The Untamed + psychic wolves, because I need Lan Wangji to pine with his wolfsister for over a decade.

Outside of fannishness, I live in upstate New York with my spouse and my cat. I define myself as bisexual of the variety wherein I am attracted to people like me and people not like me, or as queer, depending on my mood and my audience. I've dealt with some severe health situations over the last several years, some of which have been successfully resolved and some of which have not so easily dispatched. During the pandemic, I've managed to hold down a job, which is a big step forward.

*

Other business:

My resolutions for the new year are: 1) be kind* (*especially to myself) and 2) have fun. Depression has made both of these things hard.

reena_jenkins has podficced There's not a word yet (Star Wars: Episode IV, Luke/Leia/Han, immediate aftermath of canon, explicit). I really enjoy all her work and this one particularly tickled me -- by stabbing me in the heart.

To tell you the truth, I'm relieved (Star Wars: The Clone Wars/Discworld gen, if you want to know what it looks like in my head) has been translated into Russian, for anyone who wants it. (reena_jenkins also podficced that one, incidentally.) It's going to be really bizarre when the Kenobi series comes out and my mental image of Prequels Era Obi-Wan stops defaulting to CGI. Or maybe it won't; no amount of Batman movies have ever succeeded in giving me an actor for the Batman in my head, who defaults to Bruce Timm art when I'm not making an effort.