Snowflake #4: IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself.

[raven]

I haven't been doing snowflake_challenge this year, but what a good question and also I've got to know a few new people this year just gone, so here goes.

About myself, then: I'm still me, after all this time. I'm in my mid thirties, it's my birthday the week after next. I'm British-Indian, a queer, nonbinary, dull lawyer and public servant. I'm a writer, and I went through a phase last year of trying some other forms of artistic expression, but it turns out I don't really want to paint or draw or throw pots or do collage, I still only want to write. I'm a pro SFF writer and a fanfic writer too. My fiction tends to be quite sad, but it's not grimdark, and I can do comedy when I put my mind to it. Right now I'm writing a Christmas romance, and another one about solar system colonisation. I'm also a poet but not much of one.

Otherwise: I try and collect delightful friends, many of whom are also fannish people and/or writers and/or other kinds of artist. I read widely, I listen to music more or less continuously, I know some Hindi, French and Scottish Gaelic, and I understand a lot of Bengali, but the only language I can really speak is English. I'm a manic-depressive, which makes me great fun at parties. I love cities and railways, I love rollerskating and wild swimming, and I love brandy cream. And I really am terribly, unutterably dull. But I get by. And that's who I am.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Very interesting; thank you!

[philomytha]

I find it difficult to the point of absurdity to fit you and 'dull' into the same conceptual space <3

[umadoshi]

THIS, yes.

[silverhare]

Agreed.

[falena]

+1

[misbegotten]

It's very nice to meet you!

[musyc]

You don't sound dull at all! Rollerskating alone is fascinating :D

[china_shop]

♥

[musesfool]

<333

[petra]

I'm sorry your brainweasels want you to think you're dull when you're brilliant.

Glad to see you

[brainwane]

I'm glad to see you.

Re: Glad to see you

[raven]

you too! <333

[cmcmck]

Aside from my native English english, I manage French and Italian and odd bits of Angloromani (I have that ancestry) and if you're counting historical language, I can do Old and Middle English and Old Norse.

I'm married to a Scot, but he's a Scots speaker rather than Gaelic.

Living where we now do on the Welsh border, we are also picking up odd bits of Welsh.

You don't sound like dull to me! :o)

[raven]

Ah, I can't aspire to anything like as much. I'm one of those unfortunates who lost their native language when they were young, so language as a whole is a bit of a fraught subject for me, but it's only Hindi and Gaelic that I have much of at all these days. I did speak a little Welsh at some point because my primary school taught me, but I don't remember any of it at all now.

[asakiyume]

This bio makes me like you EVEN MORE than I already do (in the way you become fond of someone just from their words).

Is wild swimming when you swim in rivers and lagoons and things?

[raven]

Hi! I like you too, I am so pleased we are getting to know each other! Yes that's wild swimming, and I love it but I live so far from the sea now that it's much less feasible.

[zero_pixel_count]

Nonbinary-uk-railway-people-on-dreamwidth fistbump ;) (I'm never sure if it's actually a suprising coincidence or if it's like kids' birthdays in school classes and it's way more likely than it seems.)

I managed to use four languages in work emails before lunch today! Which sounds far more impressive than it really was, since it was actually about six words combined of German, French and Latin and the rest in English.

(I feel like maybe your 'dull' is a parallel to my 'annoying-on-purpose', like saying it helps shove aside the worry of being it long enough to actually get things posted?)

[raven]

I feel like it can't be that plausible when you consider the railway demographic in general! I was in a meeting today where I was the only non-white-guy there because the lawyer always IS the only one.

Dull - well, I feel dull, inside my head, sometimes? So perhaps it is that.

[zero_pixel_count]

Very true! I tend to think 'oh, it's not so bad in my little bubble' but my calibration for 'bad' is wildly out of whack (one of the first places I worked was a p-way depot in York in the early 2000s) and I was literally on the phone with an Indian woman colleague earlier today grumbling about a guy we've worked with for years who never really listens to either of us, and being like 'so, is he more dismissive of you for racist reasons, or because I've had so many stand-up rows with him over the years that he's a bit scared, or am I just not noticing because I can be utterly oblivious about these things?'

(I certainly feel annoying in my head ;) )

[chestnut_pod]

Hm, none of this sounds dull at all! It also made me look up brandy cream, which really is just what it sounds like. Happy upcoming birthday!

[raven]

Thank you very much! I only recently learned that brandy cream isn't sold outside the UK which is such a shame - we bought 750ml of it in mid-December and are still finding things to put it on now.

[celli]

hello! I just listened to the Spock's Brain episode of Yamok Sauce yesterday and laughed so hard I almost hurt something!

[troyswann]

If you are dull, then you epitomize the Gerard Manley Hopkins axiom:

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

[scintilla10]

Not a new follower, but always happy to see you!

Right now I'm writing a Christmas romance, and another one about solar system colonisation. BOTH of these sound right up my alley! Happy new year <3

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> I'm British-Indian, a queer, nonbinary, dull lawyer and public servant. <<

That's a cool combination.

One of my readers prompted me for a black, British, genderqueer, steampunk engineer. That's how I got the Steamsmith series.

>>I'm a writer, and I went through a phase last year of trying some other forms of artistic expression, but it turns out I don't really want to paint or draw or throw pots or do collage, I still only want to write.<<

That's a useful learning experience.

>> I'm a pro SFF writer and a fanfic writer too.<<

Cool! I am also both a professional and a fan writer, across multiple genres/topics. It's not something I see very often.

>> My fiction tends to be quite sad, but it's not grimdark, and I can do comedy when I put my mind to it. Right now I'm writing a Christmas romance, and another one about solar system colonisation.<<

I write a wide spectrum.

>> I'm also a poet but not much of one.<<

I do a lot of poetry. The "Try something new" challenge was hard for me, because I've experimented with so many different things, the only way to do sure something was new for me was to make something new. So I created a new poetic form.

>> I try and collect delightful friends, many of whom are also fannish people and/or writers and/or other kinds of artist. <<

I do that too, and especially, folks with different fields of knowledge. Sometimes I don't even know about it until they pop up a reference. One time somebody corrected the Google-Modern Greek I used into Classic Attic Greek suited to the context. :D And I can talk about quantum physics with them, without people going "What?" all the time.

>> I know some Hindi, French and Scottish Gaelic, and I understand a lot of Bengali, but the only language I can really speak is English. <<

That is an excellent spread of languages. I am fluent in English, have studied various amounts of Spanish, Russian, and Japanese; and I'm linguistic SillyPutty so things just stick to me. I probably know dozens of words in Sanskrit / Hindi from browsing yoga, various Indian religions, and our cookbooks. I knew that Hindi and Bengali were two of the biggest languages in India (I set languages for my characters a lot) but had to look up whether they were in the same family (Indo-European).

>> I love rollerskating and wild swimming, <<

Those are neat. I like cooking, various crafts, a lot of gardening, reading, and so on.