I'm a teacher, editor, coffee and tea and gin lover, film buff, book collector, amateur actor. I spend most of my spare time reading, writing, fetching fresh cups of coffee, and procrastinating. Given the choice of exerting myself or sitting on the couch, I'll take the couch every time.

In terms of fanfic, I'm primarily a femslash fan. I tend to be a serial monogamist when it comes to fandoms, and I usually get into them because I develop crushes on older female characters. I started out with Star Trek: Voyager because I fell in love with Captain Janeway. My current (since 2008) fandom is Harry Potter because I'm mad for Minerva McGonagall. Lately, I've been feeling the itch to write Downton Abbey fic (love the Dowager Countess and Mrs. Hughes), but I haven't scratched it yet.

During my Voyager days, my favorite pairing was Janeway/Seven, though I also enjoyed Janeway/Paris, and for a time I was quite taken with the dark and angsty pleasures of Janeway/Kashyk. ("Dark and angsty" is a recurrent theme of mine. My personal life, as a rule, is not dark and angsty, which is probably why I can bear to read about it.)

In Harry Potter, I'll read Minerva paired with anyone, but my favorite femslash partners for her are Madam Hooch, Wilhelmina Grubbly-Plank, and Amelia Bones. While I'm not much of a het fan, I've been totally sucked into the dark-and-angsty pleasures of McGonagall/Snape. I'm also fond of McGonagall/Moody. Though I came to the fandom for Minerva (and she remains my favorite), I've grown to love all the older women characters and will happily read any of them paired with any of them. As for m/m slash, well, since I love women so much, I don't spend much time in the m/m slash pool. But I do dip in the occasional toe. It's often very refreshing, especially when it features the older male characters (like Moody, Aberforth, Filch, etc.).

Overall, I want stories that are well-written, use standard grammar/spelling, keep the characters in-character, and show some sense of literary style. I will stop reading immediately if an author can't be bothered to spell a character's name correctly or if the characters are too unlike their canon selves and/or speak like some contemporary American kid (OMG!). But I'm happy to report that I've had the pleasure of discovering extraordinarily talented writers in fandom, many of whom transcend their source material.