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2. 20 facts about you

1. I have had this tab open for ages trying to think of good facts, and now I am going to randomly steal ideas from electrumqueen's list.
2. My fuck-off shade of red lipstick is Armani Silk in 10; my favourite everyday summer shade is NARS Niagara; my favourite everyday winter shade is Revlon Lip Butter in Sugar Plum.
3. For a while when I was younger I wanted to be an optometrist, and now I have no idea why.
4. I also wanted for a long time to be an English teacher who specialised in Shakespeare, and now I wonder why I ever dropped that idea.
5. I still haven't seen Ghostbusters. Or, come to think of it, Independence Day.
6. I wish I'd started reading historical and romance novels earlier in my life instead of buying into whatever internalised misogyny decided they were not worth my time, because DANG, the amount of enjoyment I've gotten out of those genres this year is awesome.
7. My footy team is the Sydney Swans. I don't have a team for any other sport, other than being vaguely interested in how the Australian cricket team is faring.
8. I made white chocolate and cranberry cookies yesterday and so far I've eaten, like, twelve. Maybe fourteen.
9. I played netball for a season in primary school, and then I ragequit because our team wasn't very good. I had, uh, ego problems.
10. Milk in tea weirds me out.
11. Today I made the decision to FINALLY start watching the Utena anime.
12. I have a large left lateral thoracotomy scar from heart surgery when I was a baby
13. I probably drink too much. Okay: I definitely drink too much.
14. I am very easily manipulated by things that are trying to be scary. Music. Haunted houses. The most transparently terrible sort of horror movie. And I have never seen the appeal in the adrenalin high to be gained from being scared; I just end up very cranky instead.
15. Thanks to my mother, I'm quite good at identifying birds.
16. Things that I will usually order if they are on a menu: homestyle baked beans, calamari, scallops, creme brulee.
17. Part of me would like to be a film actor simply so that I could wear amazing period dresses and have my hair done in awesome ways. I am a terrible actor. This would be a dreadful idea. BUT DRESSES. I could probably pull off playing some sort of royal lady with almost no lines; I could sweep around looking disdainful, I am good at that.
18. I'm in a terrible mood because I haven't finished any stories for months. All I seem to do is start things.
19. My car is a burnt-orange Ford Fiesta called Fernando. I like to imagine him as smug and flamboyant.
20. Asymmetry makes me feel itchy.


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this is why I keep a commonplace book

3. Your favourite quote

oh god I can't choose HERE HAVE THREE

Mate would have been Njiru's word for this: the state of which death is the appropriate and therefore the desirable outcome. He would have seen Hallet as being, in every meaningful way, dead already, and his sole purpose would have been to hasten the moment of actual death: mate ndapu, die finish. Rivers fingered his lapel badge, his unimpaired nerves transmitting the shape of the cadaceus to his undamaged brain, his allegiance to a different set of beliefs confirmed without the conflict ever breaking the surface of consciousness.

- from The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

The history of each story, then, should read almost like a weather report: Hot today, cool tomorrow. This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour cold critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today - explode - fly apart - disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?

- from Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

The way of art, after all, is neither to cut adrift from the emotions, the senses, the body, etc., and sail off into the void of pure meaning, nor to blind the mind's eye and wallow in irrational, amoral meaninglessness -- but to keep open the tenuous, difficult, essential connections between the two extremes. To connect. To connect idea with value, sensation with intuition, cortex with cerebellum.

- from 'Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction' in The Language of the Night by Ursula Le Guin

( the full list )