Introduction post

[dolorosa_12]

My name is Ronni. I'm an Australian woman, in my forties, and live in the UK.

Elsewhere online, you can find me at:

Wordpress: dolorosa12 (long-form reviews)
Archive of Our Own: Dolorosa (fic)
Instagram: ronnidolorosa (photos of nature, food, drink, books, people)
Goodreads: Dolorosa (book logging, mainly for my own records)

Please feel free to add me on any of these platforms. If I don't recognise your name (i.e. if it doesn't match your Dreamwidth name), I will not add you back unless you let me know who you are.

Friending policy

Feel free to subscribe and add as you like. I generally won't add people back unless they introduce themselves (or unless we met in a friending meme or similar), so please do feel free to say hello, either in the comments of this post, or elsewhere.

Transformative works policy

I give blanket permission for anyone to remix, translate, or create fanworks inspired by any of my fic, as long as my fic is acknowledged and linked to. There's no need to ask me for permission, although it would be great to have a link to anything you create.

Linking policy

Almost all of my posts are public, and please feel free to link these public posts (with attribution) on your own journal or Dreamwidth comms.



I'm an Australian immigrant to the UK. I immigrated in 2008 to do an MPhil, and then PhD, in medieval Irish literature, at the University of Cambridge. While I realised that academia definitely wasn't for me, I fell in love with the place, and basically never left. After a series of part-time entry-level jobs in libraries during my PhD, I moved into a career in academic librarianship. I work in one of the faculty libraries at the University of Cambridge. My job mostly involves teaching classes on research/academic skills to university students, researchers, and healthcare professionals. I really love teaching, and have found librarianship to be a profession which perfectly suits my interests, skills, and temperament.

I'm married to Matthias, a German immigrant to the UK. He's been in Cambridge since undergrad, and we met when we were postgraduate students in the same department. Like me, he left medievalist academia after finishing his PhD for librarianship, and he works in another Cambridge faculty library. Between the two of us, we have five passports (for four different countries).

I came to fandom comparably late — I've been online since 2007. My first foray into online fandom was two forums for two different books series: Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series. Although most of us have since drifted away from those two forums, and barely talk about the fandoms that brought us together, the friends I met through those two forums ('sraffies' and 'Obernetters' respectively) are still some of my closest, and the sense of community I found in those two platforms remains the (high) standard by which I judge all fannish communities.

After drifting through Livejournal and Tumblr, I found my ideal fannish home on Dreamwidth, and it's remained very much my online home base ever since. Most of my fandoms are small (think Yuletide-eligible) book fandoms, and it's very rare that I meet other people who share my fannish interests. For this reason, I've found it more helpful to connect with people who share common outlooks and ways of engaging with fandom, rather than common fandoms. I'm in fandom for conversation and community, with a preference for slower-moving, long-form blogging, rather than the rapid-fire, real-time reactions that you get on more fast-moving platforms. I like commenting, and receiving and responding to comments on my own posts. I've found over the years that I tend to connect better with people whose Dreamwidth journals are a good mix of real-life reflections, reviews/meta/fannish discussion, and links to interesting things, rather than people who are all fandom all the time, or people whose journals are solely links to their fic.

Once I'm fannish about something, those feelings tend never to go away, so my list of fandoms is ever expanding. This is a non-exhaustive list:

Pagan Chronicles series — Catherine Jinks

Romanitas trilogy — Sophia McDougall

Galax Arena, and the Space Demons trilogy — Gillian Rubinstein

The novels of Victor Kelleher

The Bone Season series — Samantha Shannon

His Dark Materials trilogy and the Sally Lockhart mysteries — Philip Pullman

The Benjamin January mysteries — Barbara Hambly

Spinning Silver — Naomi Novik

Winternight trilogy — Katherine Arden

Six of Crows duology — Leigh Bardugo

Dominion of the Fallen trilogy (and novellas) — Aliette de Bodard

The Lions of Al-Rassan — Guy Gavriel Kay

Juniper and Wise Child — Monica Furlong

The Demon's Lexicon trilogy — Sarah Rees Brennan

A Memory Called Empire — Arkady Martine

Terra Ignota series — Ada Palmer

Roma Sub Rosa series — Steven Saylor

Crossroads and Court of Fives trilogies — Kate Elliott

The Silence of the Girls — Pat Barker

The characters of Briseis and Chryseis in the Iliad (and various adaptations/retellings — barring The Song of Achilles, which I really dislike)

I'm also kind of broadly fannish/always happy to talk about folktales, fairytales and mythology, medieval Irish literature, Cirque du Soleil, and the eclectic variety of music I enjoy. I watch a lot of TV, but for the most part I don't tend to get involved in TV fandoms: my fannish feelings are pretty much exclusively absorbed by books.

My journal tends to be a mixture of book, TV and film reviews, slice-of-(my) life (I like cooking, gardening, swimming, wandering around in the fens, yoga, and travelling), links to interesting things (both fannish and non-fannish), and the occasional politics post (mainly British or Australian politics). I do my best to encourage comments and discussion, and am always happy to get comments on older posts.

Comments

[dolorosa_12]

Hi, and lovely to meet you! I hope you enjoy reading at least some of the books from the list.