Hmmmm. Don't know how accurate that is, but I hadn't memed in a while. Looking forward to a quiet evening, maybe work on the gauge swatch for my new project and then we're going to watch a movie. I finished The Draining Lake and am now eagerly anticipating getting three more of Arnaldur Indriðason's books, all thanks to the university's interlibrary loan and their very generous policy for faculty and staff. :)

I'm terribly negligent in this, but she did a color meme and I asked to play, and she gave me a sunny yellow as the color that she thinks of when thinking of me. Interestingly enough, I don't feel very much like a sunny yellow person, but I'll try to come up with 10 sunny yellow things that I do enjoy:

…

This is really hard. LOL.


1. I do love smoked gouda. When I buy it at the grocery store it's a slightly different color, but I love most yellow cheeses.


2. Autumnal leaves- while the red and orange are striking, the golden ones are beautiful too.


3. I'm not much of a condiment person, but I do love yellow mustard.


4. My favorite way to eat eggs is poached, with that bit of just slightly runny yellow yolk.


5. Though they come in all colors and patterns, yellow rain boots make a rainy day even happier for me.


6. While I'm a super sucker for peridots, I'm also fond of tourmaline.


7. I'll take any man wearing a kilt and, thusly, any tartan, but here's one with sunny yellow in it, a Buchanan tartan.

* * * * *
Does anybody else think of sunny yellow when they think of me?? I'm fascinated, and a bit perplexed. :P
* * * * *

I'm sorry, gingerspark, but I think I've already exhausted my list of sunny yellow things that I like. I'm just so much more of a somber person, or flashy in different colors. But thank you for definitely making me think!

Total author self-indulgence. Don't read if not into such. ;)

1) You've written in many different fandoms. What is it about each fandom that interested you enough to write fanfic? Is there an overall theme or themes that you like to explore that go across the fandoms? Is there a fandom that tempts you but you haven't investigated yet?

I started out in Tolkien after a fellow fan introduced me to it. She was on the academic side, and I came to it from there. I was actually writing a paper on fanfiction writers when I began writing fanfic. I was obsessed by how many 'voiceless' characters there were in Tolkien's world, and it was the Rohirrim who caught my imagination. How I jumped from there to HP fandom involves slash. I wanted to challenge myself, and wrote HP fanfic when I'd only read two of the books, I think. By then I was no longer a naive fanfiction writer; I'd presented a paper and had discovered what it was like to be somewhat well-known in one fandom and then go to another where I might as well have been Eve's housecat= nobody knew me. I was convinced I'd never write in another fandom, and then I was introduced to Wraeththu, and I threw up my hands. I couldn't not write there. Then Slave Breakers, a first in that it was another author's original fic. Across the board, I like to get into the heads of lesser-known/lesser-written-about characters. The themes I think I tend to explore, at their crux, is the fallibility of the characters. That's what resonates to me. I'd love to write in Wicked Gentlemen. The only problem is that writing anything of substance would almost be another novella within the cannon, and I know I'd not like to do that. But AUGH. Her creativity is amazing.

2) What do all your red-headed characters have in common. If anything? LOL.

They're redheads. I've been obsessed intrigued by redheads since my earliest years. Personality has nothing to do with it. It's that they've had something I wanted, at the pith of my being. Hence why I've colored my hair since I was sixteen.

But they're all fallible. It's a trend, lol.

3) How did you come upon the Wraeththu community? (Where we first met) And what was it about the Ashmael/Vaysh combination that inspired you to write their story?

When I moved to the house I lived in in Verona, Callum sent me the initial trilogy as a housewarming gift. I read, I freaked out= 'must write fanfic'. Found small LJ community. Found small other community, now routed into Forever Wraeththu. WROTE.

Ashmael/Vaysh seemed like a huge gapfiller that not that many authors had covered. I approached it with a Tolkienesque attitude, making sure that there weren't some Big Names™ who'd already written about these two and was surprised (coming from both Tolkien and HP) that there weren't dozens of takes on their background. So I placed their initial community at my alma mater in a post-apocalyptic world, and ran with it. I didn't feel as comfortable in Ash's skin as Vaysh's, but at the time, it was just a huge sandbox in which to play.

4) You are writing a new original story. What drew you to the particular setting (a monastery) and the characters you are developing? Do you know what's going to happen or are you feeling your way as you write?

The concept of the OC in a monastery just came to me. The initial idea I had looks almost nothing like what I'm writing now, however. I don't know what's going to happen. In fact, I did have an idea of exactly what was going to happen, which formulated the three tenants of their religion, and now they've gone and developed their own personalities, and my idea has gone totally out the window. Now I honestly have no idea how it will end. I know what's going to happen in the next scene. Beyond that, however, I have to wait for them to tell me. It's a bit creepy, in a way, since they're all elements of my own [sub]conscious, and they keep doing things I didn't expect.

Thanks for asking. ♥

Rules:
a) Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search (http://www.flickr.com/).
b) Using ONLY the first page, pick an image.
c) Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into Mosaic Maker. Change rows to 3 and columns to 3 (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/mosaic.php).
d) Save the image and post it!
e) If you're tagged, pass it on. And tag the person who tagged you.

The Questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favourite food?
3. What is your favourite colour?
4. Favourite band?
5. Dream vacation?
6. Favourite hobby?
7. What you want to be when you grow up?
8. What do you love?
9. One word to describe you.

( mosaic here )

1. kristi and her new brother, 2. Meant To Be Dinner: Cheese Board, 3. The Purple Moment (Part 3), 4. Coldplay en el viaje a San Felipe, 5. Rural Ireland, 6. How well I could write if I were not here!, 7. Little Scholar, 8. Eilean Donan Castle, Scotland, 9. Enigmatic Gate...

We're close enough to a weekend that I've succumbed to a meme. :P

Reply to this post by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

WORDS from jaiden_s (who now has a lovely autumnal-themed layout, reminding me that I'll be switching out myself with the equinox next Tuesday). Here we go!

i. Redheads (duh. had to.)— my fascination with redheads goes back to early childhood. Maybe Pippi Longstocking? Not sure. But I've always, ALWAYS felt that I was cheated by given pale skin, green eyes, and medium brown hair. Maybe I was a redhead in a past life. Regardless, I began coloring my hair red at age 16 and have never stopped. I have no real idea what color my hair is now except that, sadly, there's more grey showing up in the 'ol roots as time goes on. :P Bartek Boroweic is my favorite red haired male, the one featured in my Vaysh icon. ::drools::

ii. Knitting— I come from a long line of knitters on my mom's side, definitively back to my great-grandmother. I was more focused on sewing (learned as a child) until the spring of my senior year of college, when I decided it was silly that I didn't know how. After a couple of false starts, I found a then-new store in Nashville called Angel Hair Yarn, asked how much I could pay somebody to finish this sweater I'd started, and they kindly sat me down and said, "No, let's get out your pattern and figure out where you are." From there I became as obsessive about knitting as I am now about writing. I was heavily involved in the Nashville Knitting and Crocheting Guild and even snagged a few ribbons at the Tennessee State Fair in the knitting category. (I also have some for my sewing endeavors) The only reason I don't knit as much as I used to is that I can't knit and write at the same time, and while I do multitask nearly all the time, I don't even want to try recording stories out loud while knitting and then typing it in. Even I have my limits. :P

iii. Androgyny— Wraeththu fascinate me, although in my closer attention to detail as I've been writing in the fandom for about 18 months now, there aren't that many characters who seem truly androgynous. I'm compelled by androgynous looking people (Tilda Swinton most especially) but must admit that my androgyny interests are toward svelte men who have finely-boned features.

iv. Travel— My boss recently noted about me, "The roots in those feet don't run deep, do they?" No, they don't. I was born with wanderlust and even from childhood told my mother that I was going to visit and/or live in Scotland, Ireland, Australia or New Zealand. Due to travel and moving a lot I've been to 48 out of the 50 states, and lived overseas. I went to Iceland because the language interested me and I didn't personally at that point know anybody who'd been. As an adult I've discovered that I really prefer to travel alone. Now granted, I don't go to countries where I'd be likely to be attacked or something as a single caucasian female, but I've discovered that if you go as a pair, you tend not to meet as many people by happenstance or whatever. Plus I'm just getting more self-indulgent as I get older. If I'm spending hundreds of dollars to go abroad, I want to do whatever the hell I want, eat when and what I want, be spontaneous or not and not have anybody else's agenda. That said, being able to visit friends while traveling is such a joy, so I try to do both. If I won the lottery, I'd enroll in courses to learn obscure languages and travel six months out of twelve, or even more.

v. Music— I grew up in a musical family. I've been singing since I was very young, took piano for many years, and harp, tried french horn for a year, and tried following in my mother's footsteps by taking organ for about 3 years. Primarily I'm a choral singer, mostly Anglican choral music but I've sung in small a cappella ensembles, Renaissance groups, you name it. In regards to what I listen to, frankly these days I count on my friends sending me mixes and listening to EdgeRadio via Wolfie's live streaming set up.

If people would like to play, feel free!

I'm borrowing this from heartofoshun. Name your 10 absolutely favourite fandom ships (try to pick different fandoms). Ask people to see what trends and similarities they notice about your ships. I'll try to come up with 10, and they're not in any particular order. I've also noticed this doesn't specify whether they're favorites to write, read or both. Here goes!

1. Ron/Draco (Harry Potter)
2. Bagoas/Alexander (The Persian Boy)
3. Armand/Marius (Vampire Chronicles)
4. Ashmael/Seel (Wraeththu)
5. Alec/Richard (Swordspoint)
6. John Grey/Percy (Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade)
7. Remus/Sirius (Harry Potter)
8. Lee/Andrei (maculategiraffe's Slave Breakers)
9. Holden/Yves/Bran (not a pairing, sorry; maculategiraffe's Slave Breakers)
10. Cal/Swift (Wraeththu)

I used to love Ron/Harry tremendously, but I don't really seek it out anymore; while I definitely loved Vaysh/Ashmael, I wrote it the way I wanted to see it; what they were like before Vaysh's initial death was only vaguely alluded to in canon. And yes, these are all slashy, I know. Guilty.

Others are welcome to play! What struck me is I have no pairings in LotR that are fave 'ships because I wrote so much genfic. I did write a novella focusing on Thengel/Morwen, but it was a one-time deal. And the only male character I've fallen for (besides Gimli) is Tar-Meneldur Elentirmo. I wouldn't want to ship him with his wife, sadly, but then I was lucky enough to have Ennorwen write a lovely story shipping him with an OC.

I took the 43 Things Personality Quiz and found out I'm an Extroverted Money Managing De-Clutterer

Hmmm. What I find more troublesome was this note at the top of the page:
0% of the 53602 people who have taken this quiz are like you.

o_O

Edit: seems as though everybody is getting 0%. We're all so unique!!