I am a university student at the University of Sydney where I am majoring in international relations and am forced to take the occasional core unit of Global Studies, which is Anthropology disguised as something potentially interesting. Originally I am from Estonia, but I will admit that after so many years in Australia I remember almost nothing of Estonian. On the other hand, I can still make sentences in Russian and I am learning German at the moment. I hope to be able to write stories in German one day, but I think I have a long way to go since I have only just started learning the genitive case.

I have been a Tolkien fan for way too long now, although previously I often preferred reading and writing Harry Potter fanfiction. I think now I've either read every good Harry Potter fanfic or my tastes have changed, so recently I've been reading a lot more Silmarillion fanfiction. I am always amazed at the amount of detail authors of Silmarillion fanfiction can recount, I've read the Silmarillion many times and have made it through almost all of the HOME books, but I am not brave enough to actually write anything set in the First Age because I know that I will get basic things fundamentally wrong.

The HSC and the beginning of university made me stop writing almost entirely, for a while I was convinced that I will never write fiction again. Coming back to this after two years of writing little more than essays and reports, I am very rusty. 'Winter in Rivendell' is my attempt to get back into writing. Fundamentally, it's not an original idea, but I set myself a challenge of writing a readable story about a girl from Earth being transported to Middle-Earth. This is far harder than I thought it would be since I want a story that does not mess with the outcome of Tolkien's plot and at the same time has a plot of its own, which I notice that many stories about people from our world in Middle-Earth lack beyond 'she ends up in Rivendell, she meets some elves'. I can promise you now that there will not be a tenth walker. I personally detest those stories because they have a tendency to just recount the plot, I've read Lord of the Rings so I have little patience for the condensed modern-slang version often offered here. Moreover, if there is to be romance (which usually bores me to tears so I try to avoid it), she will not be falling in love with an established character.