The Five Questions Meme again

[omorka]

• Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."
• I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity
• Update your journal with the answers to the questions
• Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions

From tfbretz:

1. Tell me of your dice. Mere tools or boon companions? Do you use whatever works or are you picky about color/composition/etc.?

2. Sushi or pizza?

3. If you didn't teach, what would you want to do with your life?

4. How did you get into writing fanfic?

5. Have you ever encountered a ghost?



1) Ah, my dice. I still have two from the original set of five polyhedral dice I purchased when I first got serious about playing D&D at, oh, age 11 or 12. One of my prized possessions is a clear acrylic d12 wire-wrapped in silver as a pendant; the Spouse gave it to me as a Yule gift a few years ago. I've collected them haphazardly over the years, and since I settled on GURPS as my system of choice, I've gathered fewer odd ones. I like odd colors and textures; most of mine are either black or various mottled shades (lots of green). There's one particular set in mottled green, red, and black that I particularly like the feel of. I also have an unusual fondness for d12s, but I don't have a system that uses them very often.

2) Not all that fond of either, but - pizza, definitely. I don't enjoy most types of sushi at all.

3) Back when I was in high school, I wanted Ivars Peterson's job - writing about math for science magazines and occasionally collecting and expanding those columns into books. Unfortunately for my ambitions, he still has it, and the market will only bear one, but I'd still enjoy doing that, I think.

4) I'd been aware of fanfic from a relatively early age; some comments my mother has made over the years lead me to suspect that she at least read, and may have published, some Trek and/or LotR fanfic back in the mimeographed 'zine days, before I arrived on the scene. I wrote random self-insert scraps for whatever books I was reading throughout most of my childhood. I'm not really sure why I stopped, but I really didn't write much fiction (as opposed to nonfiction prose or really bad poetry) from high school through to about 2004.

Two things happened that year: I finally wrote a story that rides the fine line between original fiction in a shared world and fanfic, and I discovered the online fandoms for LotR and Harry Potter, and started reading fanfic in earnest for the first time, as opposed to randomly stumbling across it once in a while and enjoying it. And of course, when one starts consuming large amounts of anything, what with Sturgeon's Law and all, one's first impulse is "gods, I could do better than that." And so, from 2005 to now, I've been seeing if that's true.

Now, I'd been writing something like one fic every two or three months (with a weird drought in 2007 that I'm not sure I remember the explanation for) until this April, when, kaboom, suddenly there are rabid plot bunnies everywhere and I have three to five TextEdit windows open at any one time. I think this is at least in part my reaction to the familial weirdness from last year, but maybe it's just my version of a midlife crisis.

Anyway, while I'm sure she'd be shocked to the core by the smut, I think I can blame Mom for the initial impulse to write genfic, and I'm mildly amused that it's one of my 'transgressive' acts that she might actually approve of in some ways.

5) Yup. There are at least two antebellum homes in my hometown that are properly haunted; in one case, a friend of mine (I want to say it was fynarra, but I could easily be misremembering) and I noticed the presence of the spirit at Temple Heights before we knew it was supposed to be there, although we didn't actually see it. That one's just a homebody who never left; the one at Waverly is a lot creepier, although to be fair, I knew that one was supposed to be haunted before I ever got there.

I've run into a few other spirits in other contexts - there's something at the school, although I'm not sure it was ever human or how self-aware it is - but those two are the 'classic' ghosts I've met.

Comments

[yermie.livejournal.com]

re: #5 - I believe so, yes. As I recall it was the two of you (and I thought someone else?), who were there that night. As for Waverly, well, it's always fun to visit, especially once you know where their limits are. It's not always a good idea to keep dead relatives in the backyard, especially if you're going to have tour groups traipsing through all the time.

[fiona-conn.livejournal.com]

re: 5 -- maybe the school one is an emotional imprint left behind by generations of teachers and students? (A bit like one of the proposed origins of Slimer?)

[omorka.livejournal.com]

I have toyed with the idea that it's something like that, or at least the psychic residue of 70 years of turbulent adolescents. (For Houston, BTW, that's a pretty old building. I realize that where you are, that's kind of nothing, but buildings older than thirty or forty years are rare here.) I've referred to it as the School Spirit a couple of times - it seems to fit.

[fiona-conn.livejournal.com]

Mmm, I don't think a building has to be particularly old to absorb psychic energy.

Even about 30-40 years of continual output of emotional, physical and mental energy could be enough for a place to take on a life of its own.

[peoriapeoria.livejournal.com]

I tend to figure the only reason not everywhere is haunted is that in most places there is enough countervailing schtuff or people know better than to wake things. The first sorta how waves will cancel each other out if they're right.

Just remember. Burying your relatives in the backyard is one thing. Burying the water pipes in the graveyard is another.

[fiona-conn.livejournal.com]

Mmmm, good point.

Funny thing -- I was having this whacked out dream last night, about doing an archaeological dig in my backyard. During said dig, we discovered human burial remains. Now, the only dead things we've ever buried have been our pets once they passed, but usually not in the place where this body turned up in my dream. In fact, the body in my dream was found right where I normally, IRL, bury ritual offerings.

[peoriapeoria.livejournal.com]

Wonder if that's like how in some traditions dreams of blood relate to money? Like, offering recorperalized? (spelling sold separately.)