A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

Hi! *waves* If you know me from Facebook alone, you know me as Lucas Harrison, which is a character I write for Sylum Clan. If you know me elsewhere from fandom, you likely know me as Starkindler. I met Karin through Facebook and Minionhood, though our paths may have crossed elsewhere. I don’t know. My brain can hold an entire head canon for twenty universes, but details outside of it, forget it. I actually forgot my own birthday this year until someone said something, lol.

 

Not a lot to say about myself personally. I’m the personification of the “melting pot” the US is sometimes referred to. My ancestry consists of Mexican, Spanish, Cherokee, Chinese, Irish, Scottish, German… I work from home. I’m single and have no children. I have nephews and a niece that I dote upon. I essentially was the nanny of two of them for the first few years of their lives. I am a few credits away from a History degree, which I hope to complete in the next couple of years, once I get the money to take the last classes. Then I think I’d like to teach some, whether as a sub or as a high school history teacher.

 

At any rate, I am a writer and a crafter. I also bake…in fact, my brother is roping me into making pumpkin bread this weekend.

 

Crafting…I can be found with my hands in various crafting cookie jars, because I’m one of those who stumbles over something and says ‘hey, I want to try that!’. I’ve made greeting cards, I sometimes paint. I crochet. I don’t knit. I have attempted it a few times, and I don’t have the coordination or the patience for it, lol. So I stick with crocheting. I don’t have any projects to share concerning crochet at the moment, because I don’t have any going, and I don’t have any pics of older projects. Ah well. I do enjoy crocheting blankets and what not. I was thinking about making a Slytherin colored infinity scarf this year, because my scarves need replacing. And I am always a Slytherin, lol.

 

I’m also an avid cross stitcher, and that’s where my focus has turned lately. I love to cross stitch items, especially fandom related. One of my favorite places is Spritestitch, which has free patterns for a ton of fandom-related items. Below, you can see my current project, which is Santa!Mario. I’m making him into an ornament, and have stitched him on plastic aida.

Isn’t he adorable?!

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Also showing you my project for the rest of this year. I completed stitching the first of the Harry Potter characters you can find over here on Hazelfarm, which also has many gorgeous cross-stitch patterns for free, so check out the main blog area. The Harry Potter set has most of the major characters. This one is Severus Snape, which I did first because I had all the colors, lol. Next up is Harry. These I’m also making into ornaments (he’s clearly not finished because no string coming from behind his head), because they’re just too adorable. We’re drawing names this year, so if I get one of my sisters, who is a huge HP fan, I’ll give them to her. If not, they’re going on my tree, lol.

Admit it…you know you want to make one!

Another project of mine are the hair bows I make. Below is an image of some of the ones I’ve made. I haven’t made any lately, because unfortunately, most of my supplies were destroyed when our house flooded not this past May, but the May before, and replacing my supply stock is not cheap and is slow going. I’ll get there eventually. These I have actually sold, and I probably will again, once I get my stock of ribbon and other supplies restored. These are a few of the ones I had left from my stint doing craft shows. These are all slated for the garage sale we’re having at my sister’s house come November.

I also love to work with plastic canvas. Below is one of the gift bags I made, but I’ve also made coaster sets and magnets and wall hangings. If you’ve never worked with plastic canvas, it’s similar to cross stitching, except you don’t actually cross it, and you use special threads or yarn (I use yarn most of the time). I’ll be making gingerbread boy and girl food baskets this year, to fill with cookies and breads and give away as gifts. They’re adorable, but alas, I gave away the four I had last year and forgot to take pictures. 

Pretty little angel bag I made for an angel collector.

My other big passion is writing. I’m a writer. I started out in the LotR fandom in 2001 and took to writing like a duck to water. I have improved greatly from my first stories, and I’ve matured as a writer and as a person. I have no real interest in becoming a published author of original fiction. Writing fanfic is my hobby, one that I adore. I like playing in other people’s worlds, tweaking them to my satisfaction, building and fleshing out the worlds we often only get a glimpse at in the narrative. Even if I do choose to write original stories at some point, I would likely just post them for free on my site. That’s just how I roll.

I think the best advice I can give to anyone who wants to try to write, whether original stories or fanfiction, is while you’re experimenting, get to know yourself, who you are and who you want to be. Know your limits even when pushing the envelope. Don’t let other people’s opinions, whether they’re writers or readers, push you into writing something that you just don’t want to write or can’t cope with writing. Write what you want to write, and don’t follow along because it’s the new awesome trend in fandom. Unless, of course, you like the trend, then by all means go for it and have fun. Just…be who you want to be. It leaves a lot less room for regrets later on in your writing life.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I speak from experience. A lot of what I wrote then, I wouldn’t write now. A lot of it was pressure to fit in at the time, and I had spent so much time just trying to cope with the bad things that had happened to me when I was younger, and trying to care for everyone else around me – a grandfather with cancer, a grandmother who lost the man she’s been married to for forty years and had trouble coping alone, then an uncle who broke his back and needed help – that I didn’t know myself. Some of it was an attempt to take back control of my life and my person. Some was catharsis. Other parts were follow the trends and I look back now and go “WTF, self, W.T.F.?!” I’ll admit, I not only pushed the envelope, I ripped through it and set it on fire. I look back and say, ‘did I write that? No, that couldn’t have been me… What was I thinking? Was I thinking?’

Anyway, my older stuff is mostly not online anymore. I mean the earliest writing. I know there are copies of my stories that people have, and that’s fine. I don’t particularly care, but I wouldn’t recommend any of it to anyone to read, lol. I think the oldest you can actually find on my AO3 account is a couple of stories that were CSI and CSI Miami.  I think craft-wise, I could have done better on them, but I have no regrets, lol. I don’t even regret the earliest writing craft-wise, because I did learn. I just regret content.

 

You can find all my current stuff on AO3 for now, but for personal reasons, I’m thinking of re-editing everything and moving it to my personal site, which is still under construction. I’ll make a post about it on my FB once that decision’s been made.

Well, that’s me in all my awesome and not-so-awesome glory, lol. You can find me on Facebook, AO3 for now, and I’m a regular over on RT. I won’t be participating in November, because I just can’t settle on a plot, but I will be back on the site as an active writing participant in April 2017 so I can finish my Hobbit story that’s languishing on my computer, waiting to be finished.

 

Thanks for taking the time to listen to me blather on. 😀