10 unusual things about me

This topic from Long and Short Reviews was a difficult one, because I don’t think I’m a particularly unusual person, so trying to find ten unusual things about me was a struggle. However, I did manage to come up with a few.

·         My favourite film is “Heavenly Creatures” – People always consider that to be weird, because it’s a film about a real-life murder and ends with one of the most horrible murder scenes I’ve ever seen. However, Peter Jackson directs the skin off this film, and Melanie Lynskey is a spectacular actress.

·         My hair is blue – It took me a year of highlights on top of highlights to get it this way, but my hair is now all-over blue, and not a day goes past without a child shouting “Mummy, blue hair!”

·         I have eight tattoos – Fairly vanilla these days I suppose. My favourite one is the kingfisher on my clavicle, which was also the most painful.

·         I went to see “Pointless” being filmed – We got free tickets when we were in London and sat in the audience for two episodes of “Pointless”. Alexander Armstrong is a class act.

·         I was on an episode of “The Chase” – Didn’t win, but I did make it to the Final Chase only to get caught by Anne Hegarty.

·         Until I was 21 I had gone up in a plane but never landed in one – I used to skydive, so I went up in various Cessnas and Islanders but had never taken a commercial flight until I was 21.

·         I used to want to move to the USA – I fully intended to emigrate and get my green card, but life happened when I finished university and I never made it. I can still quote all the state capitals.

·         I wanted to be an actress until I was 18 – However, after an actor friend dumped his girlfriend over his “passion for the theatre”, I decided I didn’t share that passion.

·         I want to own a pink Cadillac Eldorado – I love classic American cars, and this one is my favourite. Would be hell to park though.

·         My ambition is to see all Shakespeare’s plays live – I’m working on it!

So what’s unusual about you?

Characters I never want to meet

This topic from Long and Short Reviews was an interesting one. I watch a lot of horror films, so there are plenty of characters I wouldn’t want to meet. But do they necessarily have to be villains?

For instance, two of my least favourite characters in fiction are Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram from “Mansfield Park”. Two of the most insipid, insufferable characters I’ve ever read, whose only good point was that they ultimately married each other and so didn’t inflict themselves on anyone else. Give me Henry Crawford any day.

In horror terms, I would say the character I least want to meet is Sadako from “The Ring”, or Samara as she was in the US remake. The epitome of J-horror’s long-haired ghost girls, an unstoppable force who crawls out of your TV and scares you to death. After watching that film I was terrified to switch the TV on for two days.

And since I am a writer, I couldn’t end without mentioning Reed James from my “I Heard Your Voice”. 

A celebrity medium based on the press perception of Derek Acorah (I have no idea what he’s really like, but the press painted him as a nightmarish diva), Reed is an arrogant jerk who leaches off more powerful mediums to boost his own low-level powers. I’ve met plenty of people like him, but would hate to meet him in person?

So who would you never want to meet?

Favourite comfort foods and why

Long and Short Reviews have a great topic this week – comfort foods. I am not a cook, so recipes are not my forte (if it’s more complicated than “put it in the oven” it tends not to happen) but I’m as fond of comfort food as the next person, and the advantage is that it’s usually straightforward and easy to make.

My favourite comfort food is mashed potato. Possibly this stems from many a happy Saturday evening meal of my mother’s cottage pie, which I still say is the best cottage pie ever invented. I make it with a small amount of milk and lots of butter, and mash it just enough to remove the lumps while still giving it texture – I know MasterChef likes you to whip it, but I don’t like it too smooth.

As a Brit, I also love to sit down to a fish and chip dinner. I like the chips greasy, with plenty of vinegar and mushy peas over the top, and the batter needs to be crunchy – far too often I end up with soggy batter. I’ve just moved house so haven’t yet found out if the nearest chippy is decent, but I’ll be rectifying that shortly.

And to finish off, I love honeycomb cheesecake. The English Cheesecake Company do an amazing one which is also big enough to fill an entire shelf of the fridge. Chocolate-coated honeycomb and creamy cheesecake – what more could you ask for?

So what are your favourite comfort foods?

Favourite websites, podcasts or blogs

This topic from Long and Short Reviews was a tricky one. I don’t listen to any podcasts and don’t follow a lot of blogs. I do, however, have a number of favourite websites, so I have those to fall back on.

Until fairly recently my favourite website of all time was Etiquette Hell, which had a blog section to post etiquette fails and also a forum to discuss everyone’s experiences. Last year the forum closed; I still read the blogs, but my primary attention has migrated to Bad Manners And Brimstone, a newly created forum for people who still want to discuss etiquette questions and bemoan stories of rudeness in today’s society. For anyone who has been pissed off by someone yelling on their phone behind them on the bus, or who has witnessed an appallingly rude customer swearing at a hapless shop clerk, this is the place for you.

Similar to this is Customers Suck, a forum primarily for customer service workers who have to deal with rude people every day. Despite the title, it’s not a place for people to brag about how badly they treat their customers – people who try that get short shrift. It is, however, a haven for people who have been given abuse by someone who wanted the sale price for a shirt that wasn’t in the sale.

My other favourite for relaxation is, unsurprisingly, Facebook, but primarily for two games that I love to play. Criminal Case is a found-objects game with a plotline where you are a detective solving murders and uncovering conspiracies along the way. I could play that all day, as I could SongPop, a game of guessing the songs and artists from brief clips.

So what are your favourites?

Characters I Want to Meet

The main problem I had with this topic from Long and Short Reviews’ blog hop was narrowing it down. Nearly every time I read a good book I find a character I want to meet.

However, the first time I can remember feeling this way was when I read the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Hari Seldon, the inventor of psychohistory, is a highly intelligent and also highly charismatic character, able to present a fascinating area of study in an interesting way. I particularly enjoyed him in Prelude to Foundation, where he is shown as a young man, ably fighting off attackers with martial arts and charming Dors Venabili, the woman who would become his wife.

My favourite female characters, on the other hand, are Cassandra Mortmain and Emma Woodhouse. Cassandra, of I Capture the Castle, is a writer and acute observer of people, capable of feeling intensely while also flawed enough to make her human. And Emma, of Jane Austen fame, is equally flawed but also equally witty and intelligent. I love watching her try to matchmake other people while being blissfully unaware of her own heart.

Of course, as a writer myself, I often find myself writing characters I want to meet. So I’ll finish off with my favourite hero Ash Drake from The Hand He Dealt. 

Tall, blond and athletic, Ash initially presents as a stereotypical meathead, a college football player who knows his way around women. But as my heroine Astra gets to know him, she finds a passionate and exciting man underneath.

So which characters would you like to meet?

A Day in My Life

This topic from Long and Short Reviews’ blog hop was a tricky one because, as a writer, you would probably expect me to say that I write all day. I’m deeply envious of writers who can do this, but I have a day job, so I can’t.

On weekdays I am a debt advisor, so I spend most of my day attempting to reassure clients who are understandably worried about their debts. My evenings, at the moment, vary a little because I am in the middle of moving house – we haven’t sold the old house yet so I will probably make at least one trip to collect a box or two of stuff to bring back to our new place. On nights when we don’t do this I will write for an hour and then spend the rest of my time with a can of Strongbow catching up on junk television and reading on my Kindle.

On weekends I will write for a few hours, then if the weather’s good my husband and I will go out somewhere with his camera so he can photograph wildlife or get high altitude aeroplane shots. In the evenings I’m likely to put a film on – I have dozens saved on my V+ box and usually have a few on rental as well. I love horror, but I also enjoy historicals, action films and biopics, so we have a wide range of options in our blu-ray rack.

So how do you like to spend your day?

Favourite Hobby and Why

This topic from Long and Short Reviews’ blog hop was an interesting one. I’m not a person who does arts and crafts or sports, so my idea of a hobby was always going to be less practical and more sedentary. What do I like to do in my spare time?

The cinema.

A lot of people will say that dinner and a film is an unimaginative date, but seeing films at the cinema is one of my favourite things to do. There’s something about the experience of watching a film on the big screen – the atmosphere, the darkness, the surround sound – that I absolutely love. I’ll see almost anything, although I’m not a lover of comedy (apart from Blazing Saddles). Action, historical, biopics – and of course horror.

Horror films are my guilty pleasure. Other than torture porn, I’ll watch any kind of horror and probably enjoy it. I particularly love paranormal horror, as there’s something about the paranormal that fascinates me – I’ve even been on paranormal investigations, although I highly doubt I’ll ever see anything real. But watching a really good horror that scares you out of your skin is something I absolutely love.

So what are your favourite hobbies?