Okay, I never posted my story about my nick before the crash, so will do so now. LnC and XF were my first fandoms I ever joined online - I can't now remember which list I joined first, the LnC ficlist, back when it was on indiana.edu, or the XFilesMature list on Yahoo. (I had gone to a couple of Star Trek conventions before I discovered all the fun stuff one can do on the computer, so I'd have to say that was my first fandom ever...) Anyway, older FoLCs may remember that I joined the fic list using my real name, but they have all sworn never to reveal it to anyone else - you remember that, don't you, oldies?
But along came the first Kerth award ceremony they held since I joined the fandom, and I had to learn how to use IRC. Anne Ciotola (I think it was you - thank you again, hon!) held IRC tutorials a week or so before, and I, having just moved to Vancouver, managed to find an internet cafe - not having my own computer yet; was spending 18 hours a day in the internet cafes or library or employment agencies, surfing the web, looking for work, or just wasting time
- and attended. First thing they told us was, you have to have a nickname. But other people can see it until you learn to block it, so best not to use your real name. I had had to take my cats to the shelter when I moved to Vancouver, because my little girl cat was a BAD traveller, and my little boy cat got too lonely without her. And I was really lonely without them! Their names were Melisma (her) and Spot (him) - he was named after Data's cat on TNG, because he was the same coloring, yellow with the odd faint white stripe (no spots, lol), and of course I was still putting the finishing touches on Through a Glass Darkly, my first (TNG) fic, so I had to show my Trek-ness somehow... She was named after a cat that my college sophomore music theory professor had had, and I had thought the name was neat and if I ever got a cat of my own, I would name her Melisma - so I did. (A melisma is a device in Gregorian chant; chant is syllabic, one note per syllable. But if you want to emphasis a syllable, you lengthen it by adding one or more extra notes to it - that figure is called a melisma. Passages with lots of melismas in them are called melismatic passages...) Anyway, that's how I got the nick you all know me as. But sometimes I have to have a last name for site registration purposes, and I'm sure not gonna use my real last name. So I cribbed the last name that I called my Mary Sue character in Through a Glass Darkly, McGregor, and my full online nick is now Melisma McGregor.
Long boring story, and now you know more about me than you ever wanted to, huh? (Except perhaps my real name, unless you've met me in person, or knew me the first few months before I got on IRC...)
Melisma (shutting up, finally, here under her Rock
)
