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Five questions from @landofnowhere
Nov. 30th, 2022 02:59 pmJoining the questions meme! Happy to give five questions to any who want them.
1. Favorite character to write for Frantic Fanfic?
'A Kafka-esque bureaucrat' is reliably fun, he (always a he, so far, I think, though the accountant helping the dwarves fell into similar territory) can find interesting ways to obstruct anyone, or get into his own situations, like being saddled with looking after himself as a small child, looking up the time paradox regulations while irritably saying that no, he doesn't know where his parents are, he isn't allowed to know those things anymore goddamnit, he signed away his family history when he took the job, and now he has to look after his younger self as a human with emotional needs? Others I remember having a lot of fun writing were Alice meeting her own evil twin through the looking glass - because Wonderland's whimsy was easy to twist into whimsical cruelty - and Sophie Hatter helping Janet with her Tam Lin situation.
2. Something you should think the rest of the world should know about New Zealand?
That to the right of the Kuratau River, as you look toward the lake it flows out from, there is a hill shaped like a hat.
I really don't know, I'm only sharply aware of the differences between New Zealand and the rest of the world when I trip over them. It wasn't that when I went to New York I thought the skyscrapers were unusually tall, it was that when I came back I realised all New Zealand's were shorter. Come to think of it, the more salient hill fact is that I grew up in a city where you could see a volcano wherever you were. Hard to get lost in Auckland if you could identify the hills. (Mountains. They are very small but the title 'mountain' is due them)
We also have a rare duck, the pāteke, that spends a lot of its time away from the water acting like a nocturnal forest rodent.
3. Which books were formative to you when you were young?
Formative. Hmm. This list could grow too long, since as a child I thought I wasn't travelling with enough books if they couldn't fill a car seat. Leaflemming started me off with fantasy by reading me The Hobbit when I was two, and I remember being surprised later on to learn that it had a sequel. (A long sequel). Things I read repeatedly as a child and hope I'd like if I returned to them: the Prydain Chronicles, Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus books, Garth Nix's Abhorsen books. Things I have returned to and know I still like: DWJ, Terry Pratchett, Bujold, Margaret Mahy, Le Guin short story collections. Things I read repeatedly which I'd be surprised to find I now liked, yet whose scenes remain on tape in my mind: Faerie Wars, The Belgariad (I found the first omnibus of that under my pillow at the end of a treasure hunt, which was fun), and some NZ-specific ones, The Karazan Quartet, in which children are chosen to travel into a fantasy world grown from a genius's computer game, and the Planet Treasure Guardians, in which children are chosen to receive magical planet gemstones and fight snake aliens from the planet Tanyaska.
4. Favorite Shakespeare play?
Variable! The Tempest and Macbeth jump to mind. The one I've spent the most time watching is Hamlet (because our high school English teacher showed us the most godawful movie of it because it had been on sale at the DVD store, and so back home we embarked on a watching-better-movies-of-Hamlet project). One of my happiest live Shakespeare memories is Pericles Prince of Tyre, but that's not because it was a great play, it was because they threw everything and the kitchen sink at the wall. Only two thirds of it stuck, but I still remember being handed one of the last fragments of a starving city's bread out of a sack, and also the duelist arriving on a motorbike. There's no play I've seen often enough to have a detailed feeling about the challenges and possibilities of putting it on, Hamlet comes closest.
5. Something you've learned from reading audiobooks?
That the mouth makes more clicking sounds than I knew; that the program which automatically edits them out costs about a thousand dollars, but I could get the free trial version for ten days, enough time to do one whole book and two chapters of another, which may be a rude shock to people when they get to chapter three;* that pause lengths are the easiest things to alter after the fact, but I'm not always conscious of when I've left pauses and when I've let one word run straight on into another such that I can't split them apart; that I probably shouldn't try to separate characters by voice depth very much, certainly not when I've forgotten about a late-book scene in which two deep-voiced men shout back and forth to each other over a siege wall. (I was planning to redo one of them later, only then my microphone broke: I'm sure 'a deep-voiced man shouts at a man whose voice is not deep but who's talking in a different audio quality' would be worse. Just integrating the few necessary retakes done on a different microphone is giving my editor a bit of a headache).
*This is not Lifelode, Lifelode is being better edited than this by a professional, and is still on its way. (At this point the combined delay sequence of me and my editor goes 'depression - covid - teaching - massive storms - teaching - microphone breakage - health problems - teaching'.) But in the meantime I made an audiobook of Floornight (here) and have started on doing What Not for Librivox, for fun, and as terrain for learning stuff like the pauses and the clicking.
1. Favorite character to write for Frantic Fanfic?
'A Kafka-esque bureaucrat' is reliably fun, he (always a he, so far, I think, though the accountant helping the dwarves fell into similar territory) can find interesting ways to obstruct anyone, or get into his own situations, like being saddled with looking after himself as a small child, looking up the time paradox regulations while irritably saying that no, he doesn't know where his parents are, he isn't allowed to know those things anymore goddamnit, he signed away his family history when he took the job, and now he has to look after his younger self as a human with emotional needs? Others I remember having a lot of fun writing were Alice meeting her own evil twin through the looking glass - because Wonderland's whimsy was easy to twist into whimsical cruelty - and Sophie Hatter helping Janet with her Tam Lin situation.
2. Something you should think the rest of the world should know about New Zealand?
That to the right of the Kuratau River, as you look toward the lake it flows out from, there is a hill shaped like a hat.
I really don't know, I'm only sharply aware of the differences between New Zealand and the rest of the world when I trip over them. It wasn't that when I went to New York I thought the skyscrapers were unusually tall, it was that when I came back I realised all New Zealand's were shorter. Come to think of it, the more salient hill fact is that I grew up in a city where you could see a volcano wherever you were. Hard to get lost in Auckland if you could identify the hills. (Mountains. They are very small but the title 'mountain' is due them)
We also have a rare duck, the pāteke, that spends a lot of its time away from the water acting like a nocturnal forest rodent.
3. Which books were formative to you when you were young?
Formative. Hmm. This list could grow too long, since as a child I thought I wasn't travelling with enough books if they couldn't fill a car seat. Leaflemming started me off with fantasy by reading me The Hobbit when I was two, and I remember being surprised later on to learn that it had a sequel. (A long sequel). Things I read repeatedly as a child and hope I'd like if I returned to them: the Prydain Chronicles, Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus books, Garth Nix's Abhorsen books. Things I have returned to and know I still like: DWJ, Terry Pratchett, Bujold, Margaret Mahy, Le Guin short story collections. Things I read repeatedly which I'd be surprised to find I now liked, yet whose scenes remain on tape in my mind: Faerie Wars, The Belgariad (I found the first omnibus of that under my pillow at the end of a treasure hunt, which was fun), and some NZ-specific ones, The Karazan Quartet, in which children are chosen to travel into a fantasy world grown from a genius's computer game, and the Planet Treasure Guardians, in which children are chosen to receive magical planet gemstones and fight snake aliens from the planet Tanyaska.
4. Favorite Shakespeare play?
Variable! The Tempest and Macbeth jump to mind. The one I've spent the most time watching is Hamlet (because our high school English teacher showed us the most godawful movie of it because it had been on sale at the DVD store, and so back home we embarked on a watching-better-movies-of-Hamlet project). One of my happiest live Shakespeare memories is Pericles Prince of Tyre, but that's not because it was a great play, it was because they threw everything and the kitchen sink at the wall. Only two thirds of it stuck, but I still remember being handed one of the last fragments of a starving city's bread out of a sack, and also the duelist arriving on a motorbike. There's no play I've seen often enough to have a detailed feeling about the challenges and possibilities of putting it on, Hamlet comes closest.
5. Something you've learned from reading audiobooks?
That the mouth makes more clicking sounds than I knew; that the program which automatically edits them out costs about a thousand dollars, but I could get the free trial version for ten days, enough time to do one whole book and two chapters of another, which may be a rude shock to people when they get to chapter three;* that pause lengths are the easiest things to alter after the fact, but I'm not always conscious of when I've left pauses and when I've let one word run straight on into another such that I can't split them apart; that I probably shouldn't try to separate characters by voice depth very much, certainly not when I've forgotten about a late-book scene in which two deep-voiced men shout back and forth to each other over a siege wall. (I was planning to redo one of them later, only then my microphone broke: I'm sure 'a deep-voiced man shouts at a man whose voice is not deep but who's talking in a different audio quality' would be worse. Just integrating the few necessary retakes done on a different microphone is giving my editor a bit of a headache).
*This is not Lifelode, Lifelode is being better edited than this by a professional, and is still on its way. (At this point the combined delay sequence of me and my editor goes 'depression - covid - teaching - massive storms - teaching - microphone breakage - health problems - teaching'.) But in the meantime I made an audiobook of Floornight (here) and have started on doing What Not for Librivox, for fun, and as terrain for learning stuff like the pauses and the clicking.
