I was looking through some stuff off an old disk the other day and ran across my one ill-advised attempt at writing Angel fanfic. Sadly, I do remember writing it—there's never any Lethe's bramble around when you need it.

There's a reason I keep my creative writing efforts to short format spoof recaps these days.

Little fanfiction rant with fact-check: There's an ongoing HP story which contains a mother and daughter named Siobhan and Shavonne. Does this make sense to anyone? Is there some strange European naming convention that I'm completely missing?

(And, fact-check: they are pronounced the same, right?)

Siobhan can be pronounced like that, but it's usually Shuh-vawn rather than Sha. I've never seen the name Shavonne in my life before.

It's like the same name spelled two different ways.

So it's sort of like using Catherine and Kathyrine? That's . . . an interesting approach to naming.

Baby name sites call Shavonne a "phonetic variant of Siobhan". And, like a big dork, I'm sitting in my living room going, "Shuh. Sha. Shuh. Sha. Shuh-vonne. Shavonne." Close enough for government work, anyway. It's like me naming my daughter "Aimilee."

It's weird, because it seems like you wouldn't use the name Siobhan without knowing at least how it's pronounced, and footnotes throughout the story suggest rather a lot of researching, so it seems like maybe it's intentional. I just can't figure out why.

Making the rounds in LJ, this take on the whole CJ debacle: [link]

My mom's name is Kathleen, and mine's Kathryn. I wouldn't recommend it--the post office got very confused and started transferring her stuff to my address when I moved out on my own.

I really like the link from Plei's article, that guy's take on the usefulness of fanfic.

Yeah, good essay. Except for this:

And if they're writing slash (fanfic with sex!), chances are excellent that you're sucking in all of their take home pay that doesn't go to rent, food and cat products.

slash is NOT fanfic with sex. Grr. Wrong in two different ways.