esmenet | 21 Days of Dreamwidth Meme

Because I was out of the house all day yesterday and typing on an iPod is no fun.

01. Why did you sign up for Dreamwidth?

A year and some change ago,

copperbadge backed up all his fic over here and talked about it a little. Around the same time, I noticed that a lot of the more insightful posts linked by

metafandom were posted on DW. I didn't sign up for a while, because I'm only good at focusing on a few things in my life at once -- if I focus on writing my violin-playing suffers, if I focus on knitting my reading suffers, if I focus on LJ my studies suffer. So I can only be active on two or three websites or the rest of my life disappears. And I liked the sites I was on at the time.

But then I poked around a bit and saw that the site looked pretty cool, and even though you needed an invite code they were very easy to get. And the subscription and access features were separate, which was a pretty big draw -- I could just subscribe to anyone who consistently posted stuff I liked without feeling awkward in the least. So I did just that, and here we are. (I still haven't changed my bio or interests since then, even though they could do with it. Oops?)

02. Why did you choose your journal name?

By the time I signed up for LJ I had started to really like online names that felt like names -- not ones that necessarily sounded like names people would have IRL, but something you could say out loud without feeling silly. My old username of LandUnderWave was starting to get a little bit, well, old, and I was starting to get interested in Buddhism -- not really in a religious way, just because it was interesting --so I signed up as

ojuzu. (Ojuzu are those prayer strings of 108 beads.) It's a good solid name, but I never quite liked the way it looked. I like it more now than I used to, actually.

Then I read The Darkness That Comes Before and its sequels (beautiful beautiful books, read them if you can) and fell in love. Well, 'love' isn't quite the right word. One of the characters just hit me so hard, because she was me. By which I mean that I could have been her.

Things didn't turn out too well for Esmenet in the end -- well, they didn't turn out too well for anyone. But her decisions could have been made by me, and it wasn't her fault the world she lived in sucked for women like her. So this name was intended partly as a warning to myself, partly as a reminder that yes, sometimes there can be awesome women in fantasy that I identify with who stay awesome, and partly to be a name that looked nice on the page. I don't remember what site I chose it for at first, but it's turned since then into something that is not really any of those three things: it's just my name. And I like it.