How I found Redwall Wiki (and social media)

Someone once asked me how I got involved on the internet .. I think it was a friend from archery. I laughed and said it was a bit hard to explain, that I'd probably take about a thousand words to describe it, and as I couldn't sleep tonight, I just wrote it out in Word. Guess what? I was right. It's a rather amusing .. sort of sad story, but I thought it might be fun to share.

Now you have to understand first of all, that I was exposed to very little tech as a kid. I knew what a VHS player was, and a DVD player as well, CD players, TVs, clocks, LP players, and slide phones with demos for games with poor CGI. That was all I knew. Computers and internet and texting were never a part of my life as a child, thanks to very little money to spare. When I finally learned about computers/internet, and all those good things I can't live without now, I was eleven. At this time I was in the height of reading Redwall and planning fanfictions, so when I found the Redwall website in the back of one of the books, and I knew I was going to have to check it out on grandpa’s computer next time we went to his house. (this was around late 2011) I found Brian Jacques obituaries on there, but I had no clue what an obituary was. My family is pretty small, and I’d not been to many funerals, and I’d never heard anyone use the term ‘obituaries’ so I legitimately had no clue my favorite author was dead. I also found .. some mailing address on there, probably not his, but I thought it was his. And I like .. seriously fangirled.

I like .. ran down from my grandpa’s computer room and I was like, ‘Dad, dad, I’m gonna write my fanfic and mail it to Brian Jacques! I found his address I’m going to mail him my fanfiction! He’s going to love it! I want to be his penpal! Maybe he’ll like it enough he’ll want to be my penpal! Maybe we’ll write the next Redwall book together!! Maybe I’ll illustrate it too!!!  ’ And my dad’s like ‘Great, you do that.’

(RIP Sayna’s delusional dream 2011- 2013) (I’m laughing so hard I’m crying right now. Oh gosh.  )

Not only was my writing //horrendous// back then, Brian Jacques had quite literally passed away five months earlier, I had read his /obituaries/, was none the wiser, and I was babbling this to about half of my family. -_- I .. can’t even .. I’m laughing so much .. It’s actually really sad when you think about it ..

Even sadder is the fact that this dream sustained my writing career for over /a year/. Yes, for a year and a half I scribbled down ‘The Warrior’s Beginning’ and ‘Four Warriors Cometh’ into notebook after notebook, dreaming of the day I would send these masterpieces to Brian Jacques and become his fast friend. I copied that mailing address and practically enshrined it .. anyway, it’s in my dairy .. and about ten other notebooks.

After a year and a half, my grandma passed away. At her funeral .. I was sad enough, but then something happened that made it ten times worse. There had been a mistake in her obituary, and my grandpa was talking about it to somebody. I heard him use that word, and I got this really awful feeling .. like your stomach just fell into your shoes. So I went to my mom and asked what an obituary was. And she of course, explained it. So for the rest of the funeral I just sat there in a gloomy, tearless silence, like a little thunder cloud, because I had the horrible feeling that Brian Jacques had been gone for quite a while.

When we went back to my grandpa’s house, I Googled Brian Jacques name (I had learned to Google search by this time) and up popped the Redwall Wiki article. I cried for a bit after reading it, I won’t lie, but then I decided to have look about Redwall wiki, since I could tell it wasn’t the Redwall website. One of the first things I saw was one of Salem’s fanfics. Then I found one of another user, and I was so elated .. because while I couldn’t send Brain Jacques my fanfics, I’d found a place I could share them with other people.

I tried for about an hour to create an account, but couldn’t because I didn’t understand that when the site asked what year I was born in, they wanted the year 1999 and not 2013. Yes. I’m serious. For an hour I tried to put in the year 2013 because for some strange reason, I thought they were asking me for the current year at that time. Finally the site locked me out because I was ‘underage’ I couldn’t grasp why, since it said 13 or older, and I’d just turned 13 a couple months before. On the way home it finally hit me, and I knew I was the dumbest person alive at that point, at least when it came to the internet.

About a week later .. the next time we were at my grandpa’s house, I finally created my Redwall Wiki account on April 14, 2013. Salem was the first person to message me (aside from the RW robot welcome thing, which yes, I believed was a person) Ohmygosh I just went back and read my first posts and oh *cringe* *cringe* Yikes! Was that me? Salem, Salem you are an angel, you are so amazing for putting up with me I was /such/ a noob good grief .. XD I sound sooooooooooo awkward help me XD XD Salem, you’re the best. Love you <3  Scottie Blue also welcomed me and was wonderful (thanks Scottie, even if you never see this) I just want to state that Scottie’s art and Salem’s stories inspired me to no end .. as did Lear’s and Selound’s .. you all might not know it, but I love your work so much. I still do :3

Salem also was the first one to ask me for a request. At that time I was like … ‘Ummm I guess this is an internet thing?’ But I was really excited too and I wrote her a literal paragraph about what I could and could not draw *hides*   She had me do a watercolor of her character Vayna Wildwood, and I didn’t know how to crop a scanned picture, so it was .. eh. But it was the start of something that’s lasted until this day.

So thanks to Salem I settled into Redwall wiki. And while I took a vacation to write some Warrior’s fanfiction, I returned to my RW fanfics and never left until this day. (Still working on my ninth one, with another and several side-stories planned)

So yea. That’s how I found Redwall Wiki and social media in general. Maybe an unconventional experience, but it’s mine, and I thought I’d share it with you guys just cause ;D