LiveJournal interview meme
Meme courtesy of salamandersam
Wanna get interviewed?
1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond with five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
1. What is your favorite dessert?
My mother is a pastry ninja, she makes the most amazing pies. When she gets on a roll she can knock off raspberry pie and rhubarb pie that are the pies of the angels. The rhubarb one is tart and the fruit sits on this custardy base that's sweet and the pastry is flaky and NOM NOM NOM!
2. When did you first become enamored of horses?
I get asked this question occasionally, and my best answer is, "Around the same time I noticed the colour of my own eyes." I'm serious. My earliest memories are of watching cowboy movies and thinking "I want a horse like that..." I would watch Gunsmoke and pretend I had a horse just like Matt Dillon's, only because at the time, being about three years old, I didn't have the vocabulary to describe what I was thinking, which was a buckskin, I used to have to tell myself it was a golden horse with black legs and a black mane and tail. (Horses may have been my first hint of the power of the exact word, although when I later tried to tell myself a story involving a dog just like one I'd seen in someone's yard, I had the same problem. It's so much more efficient to have the word "buckskin" or "Doberman" available to you when you need it.)
My dad's best friend had a buckskin gelding named El Duke (I think it was probably just Duke to begin with) and then years later my uncle, the only other horsey person in the family, bought a buckskin grade quarter horse mare named Venus. (He was going to change her name until I pointed out that Venus was the goddess of beauty.) I was with him when he found her--just walked in the barn, looked at her, and said "yes." Totally foolhardy way to pick a horse. I did the same thing with Huey, Nolan, and Mitzi. Dunno if it was my gut or my heart I was following, but it's worked out okay. (I mean, yes, Nolan died, but I would never have not wanted to own him.)
I remember my dad's friend taking us to see a foal once--I have a memory of the foal coming to the stall door and in my memory he was taller than I was, sort of a light sorrel colour with a star, and his mother at the back of the stall kind of in the dark. I can't have been more than three or four years old. I used to like cowboy songs, like Marty Robbins' old Gunfighter Ballads record (I mean an actual LP), because there would be passing references to horses (and, of course, "Strawberry Roan", which now that I have the vocabulary I know contains the best word-picture ever of a truly hideous old outlaw horse). When America had that hit with the song "Horse With No Name," in 1971 or whatever, it irritated me because I figured that after three days in the desert you would darned well know what the horse's name was. And then there was Arlo Guthrie with "Gypsy Davy" around the same time--when the guy in the song is going after his runaway wife he says "saddle me up my buckskin horse" and I really liked that.
I took a few riding lessons at camps when I was twelve or thirteen, before I joined the air cadets and started going to cadet camp every summer (awful fucking way to spend three weeks at first, but once I got into flying I liked that part) but I didn't learn to really ride until I was twenty-two. I graduated from my BA program and decided to take a community college stable management course. Total immersion. My parents figured, since I am neither athletic nor outdoorsy, that I'd get it out of my system. Of course what I did was drive it even farther into my system. Bravest thing I've ever done, really--I just sort of hauled off and tried something I wasn't sure I could do, just because I really wanted to. I figured no matter how bad I was at it I'd at least learn something. I ended up being pretty good at it, and when we were learning to longe horses, one of the instructors commented in the second lesson that it was obvious I'd done this before. I hadn't. Just in my head, for years.
There are other things I do now, and I have other stuff to think about, and I'm not as good a horsewoman as I should be, but the horse thing is always there. Always has been.
3. When did you start writing?
Six, I guess--I was writing stories when I was in Grade One, I know that for sure. But it goes back farther than that, because in the 70s there used to be this TV show called Story Theatre in which a group of actors, aided by minimal sets and the viewer's imagination, would act out fairy tales, narrating them as they went. (Alan Alda guested once, which delighted me since I was a M*A*S*H fan in those days too.)
Anyway, I really got into the whole business of telling the story as I went along. I was sort of a solitary kid in those days (I was introverted to begin with, and we lived out in the country, and in the face of any family or sibling conflict it was always easier to pull back into my own head.) So I started narrating my imaginary games, and making up characters, and of course there were pets. I didn't always write these down, because when you're a kid you can be so much more elaborate in your imagination than your motor skills will allow you to write down. So I was more of a storyteller, inside my head, than anything else. Even when I started writing stories down, there were always the ones I just told myself.
The mystery thing came pretty recently: I liked Trixie Belden and that kind of stuff, and and I read Agatha Christie, and I used to think it would be cool to write a mystery but I knew I could never write one of those "hit this" puzzle plots like Christie. You know how the really great fastball pitchers, everyone knows they're going to throw the fastball and they just dare you to hit it and you still can't? Christie would just lay out all the clues and dare you to put them together. I never could, not in the novels. but then I got to reading stuff that was less about the puzzle and more about the characters and situations--Ngaio Marsh, from Christie's era, wrote much better people and even though her puzzles were less diabolically clever, that made those books more interesting to me. I eventually realized I am more interested in the effect of the crime than in the details of the puzzle. I actually solved on Marsh book (the fatal clue was something to do with horses) and that is still one of my favourite mysteries ever because of the characters and setting.)
So that's when I started to think I could try to write my own mystery, which is really when I started to write longer projects that had a shape. (Previously I had written a couple of novels about nothing in particular and a lot of fragments.) I began with a horsey one I worked on through a dozen revisions and have mothballed--there are elements of it that make me think I may go back to it someday--but I learned a lot about writing from trying to improve that story. I'm now working on the Kowalski one. I am not all hot to be published these days--I think I used to think getting published would be a big validation or something, but I'm in a little better headspace than I used to be and I don't need that as much. I don't worry about whether I'll ever sell a book because it's so much fun to write these characters, I would hate to mess with that. I just don't worry about it much these days. I will certainly try to get the Kowalski story published but if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. There's nothing wrong with writing for fun. Maybe I'll get a Web site and publish the mysteries there when I think they're ready.
4. What is your favorite album?
Marty Robbins, Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs. (This was a tossup--I nearly said Johnny Cash's Songs Of Trains and Rivers but I haven't had a copy of that one for years.)
Yeah, I know I'm primarily a rock fan, but there's something about this one--it's the first record I ever played by myself--I remember sneaking over to the stereo, which I was pretty sure I shouldn't touch, and turning it on so I could hear these songs. When I got the CD version a few years ago I was really upset that the running order had been changed--dunno why they did it, but it took years to get used to.
Gunfighter Ballads is a collection of story-songs about the American west, so it was a combination of stories and cowboys and horses that always tickled my imagination. And Marty Robbins has that wonderful smooth baritone. Just a classic record.
5. Which celebrity irritates you the most?
Those idiots on Entertainment Tonight who won't let Anna Nicole Smith fade away. I mean, the poor woman was a pitiful wreck of a drugged-out husk, and they bring her up something like once a month, and go on about her as if she was Marilyn Monroe--or talented--or in any way interesting. I don't think anyone in the world wants to hear another word about her except those ET fools. And of course they're keeping her famewhore ex in their spotlight, with the result that poor little daughter of hers is going to grow up in this weird half-famous state (imagine being sorta-famous because your mother and your half-brother OD'd in the same week) that will probably lead her to be messed up too, and then when she meets a sad and untimely end, whatever morons are working on ET then can slobber all over her as if they weren't the ones who helped drive her to it. It makes me angry and sad just to think about it. I'm so sick of Anna Nicole, but she's too pathetic--and dead--to be angry at, so I'll save my ire for the people who won't let her rest in peace.
Want to play? Leave a comment.
Wanna get interviewed?
1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond with five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
1. What is your favorite dessert?
My mother is a pastry ninja, she makes the most amazing pies. When she gets on a roll she can knock off raspberry pie and rhubarb pie that are the pies of the angels. The rhubarb one is tart and the fruit sits on this custardy base that's sweet and the pastry is flaky and NOM NOM NOM!
2. When did you first become enamored of horses?
I get asked this question occasionally, and my best answer is, "Around the same time I noticed the colour of my own eyes." I'm serious. My earliest memories are of watching cowboy movies and thinking "I want a horse like that..." I would watch Gunsmoke and pretend I had a horse just like Matt Dillon's, only because at the time, being about three years old, I didn't have the vocabulary to describe what I was thinking, which was a buckskin, I used to have to tell myself it was a golden horse with black legs and a black mane and tail. (Horses may have been my first hint of the power of the exact word, although when I later tried to tell myself a story involving a dog just like one I'd seen in someone's yard, I had the same problem. It's so much more efficient to have the word "buckskin" or "Doberman" available to you when you need it.)
My dad's best friend had a buckskin gelding named El Duke (I think it was probably just Duke to begin with) and then years later my uncle, the only other horsey person in the family, bought a buckskin grade quarter horse mare named Venus. (He was going to change her name until I pointed out that Venus was the goddess of beauty.) I was with him when he found her--just walked in the barn, looked at her, and said "yes." Totally foolhardy way to pick a horse. I did the same thing with Huey, Nolan, and Mitzi. Dunno if it was my gut or my heart I was following, but it's worked out okay. (I mean, yes, Nolan died, but I would never have not wanted to own him.)
I remember my dad's friend taking us to see a foal once--I have a memory of the foal coming to the stall door and in my memory he was taller than I was, sort of a light sorrel colour with a star, and his mother at the back of the stall kind of in the dark. I can't have been more than three or four years old. I used to like cowboy songs, like Marty Robbins' old Gunfighter Ballads record (I mean an actual LP), because there would be passing references to horses (and, of course, "Strawberry Roan", which now that I have the vocabulary I know contains the best word-picture ever of a truly hideous old outlaw horse). When America had that hit with the song "Horse With No Name," in 1971 or whatever, it irritated me because I figured that after three days in the desert you would darned well know what the horse's name was. And then there was Arlo Guthrie with "Gypsy Davy" around the same time--when the guy in the song is going after his runaway wife he says "saddle me up my buckskin horse" and I really liked that.
I took a few riding lessons at camps when I was twelve or thirteen, before I joined the air cadets and started going to cadet camp every summer (awful fucking way to spend three weeks at first, but once I got into flying I liked that part) but I didn't learn to really ride until I was twenty-two. I graduated from my BA program and decided to take a community college stable management course. Total immersion. My parents figured, since I am neither athletic nor outdoorsy, that I'd get it out of my system. Of course what I did was drive it even farther into my system. Bravest thing I've ever done, really--I just sort of hauled off and tried something I wasn't sure I could do, just because I really wanted to. I figured no matter how bad I was at it I'd at least learn something. I ended up being pretty good at it, and when we were learning to longe horses, one of the instructors commented in the second lesson that it was obvious I'd done this before. I hadn't. Just in my head, for years.
There are other things I do now, and I have other stuff to think about, and I'm not as good a horsewoman as I should be, but the horse thing is always there. Always has been.
3. When did you start writing?
Six, I guess--I was writing stories when I was in Grade One, I know that for sure. But it goes back farther than that, because in the 70s there used to be this TV show called Story Theatre in which a group of actors, aided by minimal sets and the viewer's imagination, would act out fairy tales, narrating them as they went. (Alan Alda guested once, which delighted me since I was a M*A*S*H fan in those days too.)
Anyway, I really got into the whole business of telling the story as I went along. I was sort of a solitary kid in those days (I was introverted to begin with, and we lived out in the country, and in the face of any family or sibling conflict it was always easier to pull back into my own head.) So I started narrating my imaginary games, and making up characters, and of course there were pets. I didn't always write these down, because when you're a kid you can be so much more elaborate in your imagination than your motor skills will allow you to write down. So I was more of a storyteller, inside my head, than anything else. Even when I started writing stories down, there were always the ones I just told myself.
The mystery thing came pretty recently: I liked Trixie Belden and that kind of stuff, and and I read Agatha Christie, and I used to think it would be cool to write a mystery but I knew I could never write one of those "hit this" puzzle plots like Christie. You know how the really great fastball pitchers, everyone knows they're going to throw the fastball and they just dare you to hit it and you still can't? Christie would just lay out all the clues and dare you to put them together. I never could, not in the novels. but then I got to reading stuff that was less about the puzzle and more about the characters and situations--Ngaio Marsh, from Christie's era, wrote much better people and even though her puzzles were less diabolically clever, that made those books more interesting to me. I eventually realized I am more interested in the effect of the crime than in the details of the puzzle. I actually solved on Marsh book (the fatal clue was something to do with horses) and that is still one of my favourite mysteries ever because of the characters and setting.)
So that's when I started to think I could try to write my own mystery, which is really when I started to write longer projects that had a shape. (Previously I had written a couple of novels about nothing in particular and a lot of fragments.) I began with a horsey one I worked on through a dozen revisions and have mothballed--there are elements of it that make me think I may go back to it someday--but I learned a lot about writing from trying to improve that story. I'm now working on the Kowalski one. I am not all hot to be published these days--I think I used to think getting published would be a big validation or something, but I'm in a little better headspace than I used to be and I don't need that as much. I don't worry about whether I'll ever sell a book because it's so much fun to write these characters, I would hate to mess with that. I just don't worry about it much these days. I will certainly try to get the Kowalski story published but if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. There's nothing wrong with writing for fun. Maybe I'll get a Web site and publish the mysteries there when I think they're ready.
4. What is your favorite album?
Marty Robbins, Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs. (This was a tossup--I nearly said Johnny Cash's Songs Of Trains and Rivers but I haven't had a copy of that one for years.)
Yeah, I know I'm primarily a rock fan, but there's something about this one--it's the first record I ever played by myself--I remember sneaking over to the stereo, which I was pretty sure I shouldn't touch, and turning it on so I could hear these songs. When I got the CD version a few years ago I was really upset that the running order had been changed--dunno why they did it, but it took years to get used to.
Gunfighter Ballads is a collection of story-songs about the American west, so it was a combination of stories and cowboys and horses that always tickled my imagination. And Marty Robbins has that wonderful smooth baritone. Just a classic record.
5. Which celebrity irritates you the most?
Those idiots on Entertainment Tonight who won't let Anna Nicole Smith fade away. I mean, the poor woman was a pitiful wreck of a drugged-out husk, and they bring her up something like once a month, and go on about her as if she was Marilyn Monroe--or talented--or in any way interesting. I don't think anyone in the world wants to hear another word about her except those ET fools. And of course they're keeping her famewhore ex in their spotlight, with the result that poor little daughter of hers is going to grow up in this weird half-famous state (imagine being sorta-famous because your mother and your half-brother OD'd in the same week) that will probably lead her to be messed up too, and then when she meets a sad and untimely end, whatever morons are working on ET then can slobber all over her as if they weren't the ones who helped drive her to it. It makes me angry and sad just to think about it. I'm so sick of Anna Nicole, but she's too pathetic--and dead--to be angry at, so I'll save my ire for the people who won't let her rest in peace.
Want to play? Leave a comment.