Once you get this you must share 5 random facts about yourself. Then pass it on to your 10 favorite followers
1. Irish dance is one of my greatest joys and I’m planning on competing maybe two or three more years. Then I will probably be taking the teacher’s exam because I honestly can’t imagine life without dance so I might as well stay involved in the sport by teaching it! Also I plan to go back to school to get my MA but I’m postponing that so I can focus on dance; I already regret being away from competition for four years while getting my BA.
2. I unexpectedly met Sir Ian McKellen two years ago while in line for the Hobbit panel at SDCC and I had forgotten to bring my copy of The Hobbit with me so I had nothing for him to sign (it was like 2AM and he just happened to come to my section of the line to chat with folks so I got a nice long while to talk with him before other people realized he was there and he got mobbed). So I asked him to sign the Hobbit shirt I was wearing (which I had bought only that day) and he signed his name and a little X on my right boob area and I haven’t worn it since because that shirt is now my precious. No, wait, I wore it the first time I watched AUJ in theater but that’s it. Also someone got him to say “YOU SHALL NOT PASS” while wearing a paper Gandalf hat, which was one of the greatest things I have ever experienced ever XD3. My breakfast every day usually consists of a giant mug of tea, two eggs, two pieces of wheat toast, and a fruit of some kind. Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day unless it’s steak or shepherd’s pie or pasta for dinner!
4. I finally caved and bought the Marvel Lego video game last week and I was playing it with my younger sister and when we unlocked Captain America I hollered “MINE” and stole the little kid’s controller so that I was controlling Cap instead. I just love Steve Rogers okay.5. I’m currently writing a fantasy novel. It’s coming along s l o w l y.
YOU MY FRIEND JUST LINKED ME TO YOUR FIC AND I HADN'T READ IT AND NOW I DID AND I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW IT WAS YOU YOU'RE AMAZING OMG AND THEN SHE WAS LIKE SHE HAS A TUMBLR AND SHE LINKED ME AND I WAS LIKE OMG I KNOW HERRRR I FOLLOW HER IT'S YOU IT'S YOU WOW YOU'RE A GOOD WRITER *ahem* anyway yes hi
THIS JUST MADE MY DAY. Hahaha, HIIIIII *waves frantically*
I was tagged by ourharpsandgold, check out her blog because it’s awesome!
Rule 1: Post the rules
Rule 2: Answer the 11 questions and then make 11 of your own
Rule 3: Tag 11 people and link them to the post
Rule 4: Let them know they were tagged
01. What’s your favorite meal?
It depends on my mood, but I will NEVER say no to shepherd’s pie. I have my own recipe that I use when I make it and it’s delicious. Always cook the meat with Worcestershire sauce, that’s one tip I can share. And if I get to cheat and say I can have a soup with the main course (I love basically all soups), then there’s a lentil soup I make that’s super good and healthy, so that too. And then homemade mochi for dessert.
02. What’s your idea of a perfect twenty-four-hour day/night?
Sleep for nine hours.
Go running/swimming/some other form of cross training for an hour. If I’m doing pilates or something like that I’ll watch an episode of one of my favorite tv shows at the same time or part of one of my favorite movies.
Irish dance for a few hours—I’ll say two.
Write without any writer’s block at all for five hours, and when at the end of those five hours I read my words they’re all amazing and don’t need any editing at all.
Read a good book for two hours while curled up in a blanket if it’s chilly or sunning outside if it’s warm. An alternative to this is spend two hours at a bookstore shopping for good new books to read later.
Spend an hour drinking tea while catching up on facebook, tumblr, emails, etc. Use this time to hold/play with my pet rats too.
I guess I should shower since I worked out for three hours, so 30 minutes for the shower.
The other 30 minutes can just be scattered throughout the day for whatever.
And I’ll spend the three remaining hours on breakfast, lunch, and dinner, one hour of eating each, because I am a Hobbit.
03. Morning bird or night owl?
Definitely a night owl. I always get the desire to work on my novel at about 2 AM. When I was in school I always tried to get really early morning classes though.
04. Introvert or extrovert?
I think I’m more of an introvert, as I can happily spend most of my time just by myself with a book or writing, and staying at a social function for a long period of time is mentally exhausting. If I go to a party I’ll usually be ready to leave within a few hours. But I don’t mind talking to people or spending time with friends, and I enjoy having conversations, so—introverted but not anti-social.
05. Favorite holiday?
Christmas, definitely! I love baking cookies and drinking hot chocolate and decorating the tree, and everyone just seems so much more cheerful. Sadly there’s no snow where I am, but it does get frosty sometimes. Also church decorations are splendid at Christmastime, all rich reds and evergreen and gold. Runner-up is St. Patrick’s day because I love performing at Irish dance shows.
06. What’s one word you constantly misspell/mispronounce, even if you remember the correct way right after?
I pronounce “minotaur” as “My-no-taur” because I spent most of my childhood growing up in Oxford, UK and that’s how it’s supposed to be pronounced in England. Here in America, everyone insists it’s supposed to be pronounced “Min-o-taur.” I maintain that sounds dumb, but technically I’m mispronouncing it according to my peers. As for spelling, I always forget how to spell traveler (one or two ‘l’s?????) and the only way to spell grey is with an ‘e,’ people, it looks horrid with an ‘a.’
07. In a perfect world, dinner first or dessert first?
At the same time! :D
08. What’s one thing you want, right now, this very second?
For this awful eye infection that I have to heal up and for me never to get one again. For about three years now I’ve been extremely prone to eye infections and they’re always ghastly and take forever to heal and I don’t know why I get them.
09. Are you competitive, or is a game just a game? So competitive. I used to have fits when I lost board games as a child. At my first feis I placed third out of thirty girls and was furious because I didn’t get first. Now I don’t get angry if I don’t do as well at something as I want to, but I do get very disappointed and hard on myself; I see it as a personal failure.
10. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody sees, did it happen?
Yes, because eventually someone is going to find it lying on the ground and it had to get there somehow.
11. (This question is the most important one) What are the top five things you love about yourself?
I have never really thought about this. Huh!
1. I am imaginative. I love writing stories and having these entire worlds and characters in my head all the time is so much fun. And people who read my writings tell me I’m good at writing, so I’m really grateful for that and hopefully will be able to make a living with it one of these days!
2. I am very well-read. My wonderful parents taught me how to read when I was very, very small, so I’ve read a LOT. LotR when I was six, The Silmarillion when I was ten, Tale of Two Cities when I was thirteen, War and Peace when I was sixteen, and so on. I read mainly pre-1900 classics and fantasy novels (though I’m very picky about fantasy; 98% of the genre is garbage but the other 2% is ambrosial perfection) but once I started college I started diversifying and reading more recent publications too because they’re easier to fly through and I didn’t have much time. I’m a very fast reader; I read Tale of Two Cities in one day, for example, and Les Miserables in three.
3. I am an eldest sibling. I have seven younger siblings and I guess some people might find that annoying but I love it. Something crazy is always happening that I can get involved in, and I have excuses to watch Disney movies and play swordfighting at public parks and get my picture taken with Flynn Rider at Disneyland ;)
4. I’m smart, and sometimes that’s kind of difficult to deal with because in school, for example, I always chose the harder options on assignments and overachieved and took too many classes at once because I wanted to challenge myself, but I wouldn’t want to be any other way. Basically I’m like Hermione Granger.
5. My hair. It’s straight and fine and dark brown but gets reddish highlights in the summer, and it grows fast and I hardly ever trim it; it’s currently almost to my knees. I used to want it to be wavy and still secretly do sometimes, but I’ve learned to love it for what it is.
Ok, and here's the 11 questions of my own:
Favorite TV series?
What was the best thing that happened to you yesterday?
What is something you're most proud of?
Cake or pie?
If you could live someone else's life for 24 hours, who would you pick?
If you could make someone else live your life for 24 hours, who would you pick?
Favorite mythological creature?
If you could time travel, where would you go?
Now's your chance: What book would you wholeheartedly recommend to EVERYONE?
Favorite music to dance/work out to?
Something you're looking foward to in the next six months?
4) What do you think about most?My writing. Basically my characters. I spend the majority of my time visualizing what they’re doing or letting conversations and scenes play out in my head. Also Tolkien’s works; probably not an hour goes by without me thinking of SOMETHING Tolkien.9) Simple but extremely complex. Favorite band?Poets of the Fall. They’re a Finnish band, so not very well known generally here in the States, but their music is amazing (I’ve made fans of more than a handful of my friends after introducing them to PotF’s music). Check out Carnival of Rust, Locking Up the Sun, Sleep, Lift, Roses, Illusion and Dream, War … Oh, so many. Also the vocalist is superb, and yes, he really does sing like that live.14) Who is your celebrity crush?Richard Armitage. Which you could probably have guessed if you follow this blog, haha. A professor in college had us go around the room saying who our celebrity crush was and I said Richard, and all my classmates just looked at me blankly until one of them googled him and then they just looked at me in confusion. But I dunno, I really respect him because he seems like a nice guy, he’s a Tolkien fan, he’s a great actor with a great voice, he’s shy but eloquent, and he seems really smart. I have been fortunate enough to see him in person too, so I’m a lucky duck.15) How do you vent your anger?If I’m mad at a person I sometimes vent by just ripping them to shreds verbally—I can get really bitingly cutting when I want to. Not yelling, just talking really nasty. I’ve tried to stop that though. So more usually I vent by watching or reading something that I enjoy to distract me and cool me down. Which I guess isn’t venting so much as it is controlling my anger.20) Do you believe in ghosts? How about aliens?I think I believe in ghosts—certainly I believe in souls. I think ghosthunter shows and stuff like that is silly, but if you tell me a building is haunted, I’m not going inside. On a related note, when I was six I spent a week living at a castle in some remote Welsh forest as part of a school fieldtrip, and the first thing we did upon arriving was get taken around the castle on a ghost tour in which our guide would tell us about ghost sightings (a woman in white who walked the hallways at night, a baby the lord of the castle murdered who you could still hear crying, etc.) and show us where people died (thrown into a pit in the dungeon, sealed inside a wall, etc). Trying to sleep that night in the castle’s great hall was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life.
As for aliens—I don’t expect to meet any, but I think the probability that there’s other life in the universe is really high. There’s a LOT of planets out there.
2) If you could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be?If I could time travel, it’d be JRR Tolkien, definitely! I actually have been fortunate enough to meet his daughter (at school in Oxford when I was six), so I guess I kind of got as close as possible to fulfilling that wish anyway. If it has to be someone still living now, then either Neil Gaiman (because I adore his writing and would love to talk about both writing and GK Chesterton with him!), or Richard Armitage because he’s lovely and such a Tolkien nerd and we could talk about the backstory he created for Thorin, and about how it was filming The Hobbit, and about The Silmarillion, and he played both Thorin Oakenshield and John Thornton, and he seems like he’d be an intelligent conversationalist. Me being the lucky person that I am, I actually did get to see Richard in person at SDCC last year, so that was brilliant, but I did not actually meet him.3) Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 23, give me line 17.“She has mocked me from the day I joined her, but I have made her nervous all that time.” -Schmendrick the Magician, from “The Last Unicorn.” The book and character from which, incidentally, I got my url!
1) Put your iTunes on shuffle. Give me the first 6 songs that pop Ok, so I listen to a lot of radio productions and I have the CoH audiobook read by Christopher Lee as well as the Tolkien Audio Collection, so some of those tracks popped up. Seeing as how they aren’t really songs, I didn’t count them. But if you’re interested, in addition to the songs listed below, I also got Edinburgh and Abu Dhabi from Cabin Pressure, Tolkien reading an excerpt from RotK, and the Death of Beleg as read by Christopher Lee ;_;As for the songs themselves:1. Sirens (Jane Eyre the Musical. I actually despise the story of Jane Eyre, because I just can’t get past the fact that Rochester is an utter creep, but I own this track from the musical adaptation because JAMES BARBOUR’S VOICE IS HEAVEN.)2. Where Do We Draw the Line? (Poets of the Fall. I always thought this song sounded rather Silmarillion-y.)3. Cry of the Celts (From Feet of Flames; one of my favorite Slip Jigs.)4. Davy Jones (Hans Zimmer, from PotC 2)5. Man or Muppet (from The Muppets soundtrack, LOL)6. Abigail’s Song (from Doctor Who’s Christmas Carol episode)And as a bonus, while I was typing this up “Slipping” from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog started playing, and I love that song so yeah I’ll include it too.
8) If you are outside, what are you most likely doing? Um, probably running. I run to cross-train for Irish dance. Either that or I’m at one of those horrid outdoor feises where I have to dance in a full velvet dress and wig and makeup without getting dust or grass stains on my socks while it’s about 100 degrees F and girls are literally fainting in the heat. The joys of Irish dance competition in Southern California, honestly.
13) What is your greatest weakness; your greatest strength?My greatest weakness is, I think, that I have too many interests. It’s hard to focus on just writing, for example, when I also love drawing, painting, Irish dance, cooking, and a billion other things. That’s why I’m putting off grad school, because I don’t know yet what I want to study—fairy tale studies was fascinating in undergrad, but I also like a lot of Victorian British literature, Classical lit, American writers like Steinbeck and Melville, and I even like non-literature related stuff like history and nutrition studies. It’s hard to follow your passion when you aren’t sure what that passion is. Also I procrastinate.My greatest strength is my imagination. I’m very creative and apparently I’m good at expressing and utilizing that creativity not only in original fiction and writings like that but also when I write massive essays and scholarly things. I pay attention not just to what I’m saying, but how I’m saying it, because creating anything is very important to me. Apparently it also allows me to approach research and scholarly writing in a good way, according to various professors. And if I need motivation on doing something I just imagine I’m on a quest or something and get it done, haha. I’m always writing stories and it keeps me sane and happy :)
Thanks for the update!!! Will there be any new characters we haven't heard of?x
You’re welcome! The only characters I can recall them mentioning is Eret, Drago, and Valka. And all the old gang is back, I personally can’t wait to see what adult/older teenage Ruffnut and Tuffnut are like!
