7.28.2015

Blog Hop: The Dragon's Loyalty Award

You have now reached the edge of the internet.

But wait! It's alive? It can't be!

But it is.

That's right, this little blog got nominated for The Dragon's Loyalty Award in another blog hop!


First, I'd like to thank my friend Maggie Maxwell at The Wandering Quille for nominating God of Ephemera. That I must now resort to this blog necromancy is entirely her fault.


Second, I should probably explain how this works.
  1. Visit and thank the blogger who nominated you.
  2. Acknowledge that blogger on your blog and a link back.
  3. You must share 7 things other bloggers may not know about you.
  4. Nominate up to 15 bloggers for Dragon’s Loyalty Award, provide a link to their blogs in your post, and notify them on their blogs.
  5. Copy and paste the award somewhere on your blog.
In that vein, therefore, I bring you: seven facts you might not know about me! (Unless you know me in meatspace. You know who you are.)

Brace yourselves. There's a wall of text coming!
  1. There are certain things I HATE wearing, and will only do so under varying levels of duress:
    • Pants and shorts. ESPECIALLY jeans. Can’t stand ‘em. No matter how loose and pajama-like they are, I always feel like my midsection is being compressed. Ugh. That is why, unless it’s an activity that absolutely requires pants (like riding a bike), I’m almost always wearing a dress or a long skirt. Air flow. Freedom. I like those things.
    • Socks…and shoes. Sweltering foot prisons, all of them! Unless I’m doing something that requires extra protection, I wear comfortable cushy flats. Socks IF it’s cold.
    • Turtlenecks. Neck vices. HELL to the NO. When it gets cold, I rock the scarves or die trying.
    • Sweaters that don't have a button-down front. Again it's because they make me feel suffocated, but I can get away with avoiding them, given that I live in Florida.
  2. My handwriting never did settle down into one neat pattern like most people's do. It's not that it's terrible, or illegible. Neatness I can achieve, and it looks like an adult's handwriting, but  consistency is impossible. I can never make my letters the same size, shape, weight, or style, across more than two lines of text. It's easier for me to write legibly when I don't have to lift the pen or pencil as much, which is why I when I hand write anything, I write only in cursive/longhand. Even so, I end up with about five or six different styles of handwriting just on the same page. As for printing, NOPE. I can't be having with that.
  3. I love gloomy, rainy weather. The nastier it is outside, the happier I am. Sunlight, hisssssssss! It burns usss! I like sad. It's like happy for deep people. Sad, yes. Sad endings, no. Much as I love drawing inspiration from the gloom, there must be at least a ray of sunlight at the end of the story. That’s the end though, and until I hit it, I love putting my characters through every level of hell. 
    • My favorite mode of writing is to wait until it’s pitch dark outside (bonus points if there’s a thunderstorm), turn off all the lights, turn up the music, dim the screen, close my eyes, and pound away at the keys. However, having to wake up in the morning for work has made that a luxury. Still, in order to properly keep characters in the throes of existential angst, any sort of rotten weather is the way to go. I do my best writing then. 
    • It's true, I function like a Terry Pratchett troll. The colder it is, the better my brain works. The hotter it is, the more I shut down. I work best when it's slightly chilly. Thus, writing-wise, my most productive months are the ones with dreary weather. Needless to say, living in Florida does NOT help. 
    • Hurricane season this year has made it a little better though. While my coworkers groan at the miserable weather, I'm sitting in my cube or car grinning like a kid at the glorious thunderstorms we've been having. (Also, since music is as necessary to writing as breathing, I grin like a kid every time the riffs of the song I'm listening to sync with the lightning, because that is pretty metal, no lies.)
  4. The only romance I read is by Georgette Heyer. I could probably write an entire post about why I love Heyer, so I'll just go with the short version here. Her stories are historically accurate, it's actual romance as opposed to mere smut, and her books are hilarious. In general though, I don't have any objection to romance as a genre, but I find so much of it to be an excuse for smut with not much in the way of character or world development, which just doesn't do anything for me. That said, I do love romantic subplots/arcs coupled with other main genres.
  5. I'm obsessed with music, specifically metal and rock. I’ll talk about metal here, because it is the main source of many of my plot bunnies, and comprises the vast majority of my novel soundtracks. 
    • Doom metal, death metal, black metal, power metal, prog metal, symphonic metal…I will listen to it, no matter how obscure or esoteric. I collect and categorize albums into my own arcane genres the way writers organize their bookshelves. 
    • I trawl the internet daily for stuff I haven’t heard, and I pretty much listen to a new (new to me, even if it's been out for years) album every day for at least 5 out of 7 days of the week. 
    • I’m pretty sure that all the albums I’ve amassed over the years (either via Spotify playlists, digital purchases, CDs, etc.) number in the thousands.
  6. I’m increasingly realizing that while I’m a writer, I kind of enjoy being an artist too. My parents always knew I’d be a good writer, though I didn’t see it until much later. However, I know that I've been drawing things since my chubby little hand could hold a pencil. It trailed off after high school (though it never entirely stopped) for various reasons - time, lack of direction, tedious art classes that sucked all the joy out of it, hand injuries. 
    • Those of you who were around when I started seriously writing after my first NaNo will know of the struggles I had wrestling with my story hydras, and figuring out how I worked, let alone how my story worked. Well, I was (and still am, to a degree) having the same troubles with drawing. 
    • In suffering through those art classes though, besides gaining knowledge, I learned one thing: I just cannot draw anything that doesn’t have a story behind it. Landscapes? Still lifes? Abstracts? Pretentious interpretations of life, the universe, and everything? Copying a model from a magazine? Psh, I’d rather scoop out my eyeballs with a charcoal stick and serve them to a yeti on top of a hot fudge sundae. 
    • Drawing a character enacting a scene from a story, though? BOO-YAH. Somehow, finding reference pictures of human models who looked like that character, scenes from our planet that looked like that scene, etc. all suddenly became fun. Practice became fun. 
    • Strangely enough, I’m also realizing that the opposite is also true: I can’t write an entire story without drawing at least some part of it out. It’s a great tool for breaking through plot holes and POV problems for me. In fact, I’m increasingly coming to realize that drawing and writing are inextricably linked in my mind. I can’t do one without the other. 
    • That's why I really want to do a web comic one day. This would help me use how I work in order to help me fill out my two greatest weaknesses: plotting a story beforehand, and designing the world, both of which are required for a comic, to some degree. It also lets me properly exercise and practice both my writing and my drawing, without having to switch and prioritize between them. That’s not to say that’s all I’ll ever do, but I would like to do at least one comic to practice with.
  7. At this moment, I have 115 ideas. 92 novels, 39 short stories, 4 novellas, and 6 plot marshmallows (ideas and snippets that haven’t been formed yet.) Oh wait. Add one script to that, for which I just had an idea. Let’s just say that with the workload I’ve given myself, I’ll have to hope that some of the life-extending technologies I have in my stories actually come to life, because the only way I’ll get through them is if I clone myself repeatedly so that I really can work on multiple novels at the same time.
Well, so there's that monolith for you to ponder over! Make of it what you will.

Ideally, this is the part where I would nominate some fellow bloggers to receive this award next, but this is the edge of the internet. Any who go beyond are liable to fall off into the void, where the tumbleweeds live.

Therefore, I dangle this shiny badge in the eyes of the cyber stars and electric wind. 

Who among you elusive spirits is brave enough to take on the dragon? 

If you so dare, and would like to be nominated next, post in the comments or let me know through your usual channels (forum, message, whatever).