Another meme

[la_marquise]

This one via a_d_medievalist:

The problem with LJ: we all think we are so close, but really, we know nothing about each other. So ask me something you want to know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away. Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you.

In other news, today I have to:
make the Christmas cake
dye my hair
clean bathrooms
do some revisions on GK
write a review
answer some of my email
Go to Waitrose

I wonder how many I'll manage? At least I'm not shattered this morning, unlike the first half of this week.

Comments

[watervole.livejournal.com]

What have been your main areas of research? I have a rough feel, but not the specific.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

My PhD was on eleventh century Wales and its political networks, internal and external. I've also worked on two mediaeval chronicles (oen Irish, one Welsh), studying how they were written, analysing their sources, biases and structure and their relationships to other surviving texts. Other things I've worked on include the poltical and social structures of 9th century Denmark, the kinship networks of early mediaeval Wales, feuds, the letters and charters of the Welsh princes c. 1100-1300, the history and position of women in early Wales and the relationships of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia to its Welsh neighbours.

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

Okay, which writers (if any!) are your influences and inspirations?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Alexandre Dumas, pere; Tanith Lee; Rumer Godden; probably Tolkien somewhere and long ago; George R R Martin; Sheridan Le Fanu; and, more recently, Phil Rickman, Miyuki Miyabe and Vikram Chandra.

[cdave]

I'm perputually interested in fannish origin stories, so, how did you find fandom?

And which came first out of fandom, and writing genre fiction?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I was a teenage Trek fan, and I joined a fan club having found a list of addresses in a magazine called TV Sci FI monthly. Trek fandom introduced me to Andromeda bookshop, which used to list cons in its catalogue and I was able to go to a few Trek-themed ones (I was 13 at the time, and my parents felt much happier with mainly female Trek cons). I hung out a bit with the Leicester SF club, but they were too far away for easy contact (only 15 miles, but we had no night buses) and I went to my first mainstream con in 1979 (Fantasycon 5; I was 16 or 17). When I went to university, I joined the SF society, who were con-going, and... My next con was Fencon, then Mexicon 2.
I've been writing since I was about 7 and started on sf and fantasy at 8, influenced by Tolkien, Andre Norton, Heinlein and Trek. So writing came first and has always been my big ambition. I just didn't tend to talk about it much in fandom.

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

I find this a feature of LJ, not a bug. You can ask me anything you like whenever we meet.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Thank you! I know what you mean!

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

Do you still work on things academic?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Not really. I think about them, but I only put pen to paper when asked to.

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

My professional career dates to one of those tired old impulses to finally get that technical paper written. A friend had decided that the way out of her family's financial woes was for her to write a Harlequin Romance. So she got together a women's writing group as a support system. I thought it would help me to get started on aforementioned paper, but instead, I hammered out a draft of the story I'd been telling myself as I fell asleep. 200 pages, utterly unpublishable, but I ended up sending it to a published writer, who wrote a very kind critique... and the next thing I knew, I had one short accepted in a fanzine and another in the first SWORD & SORCERESS.

Never did write the technical paper. Way too boring.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Fiction is a lot more fun to write in most ways.