Sharp Words

Dammit, I got tagged for a meme by Haley of The Beacon. She originally suggested that the eight random things should be writing-related - she’s since recanted, but since this is my reading & writing blog, I’m going to stick with the theme anyway.

The Rules:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’ve been tagged, and to read your blog.

So. Let’s try this.

1. Somewhere, I have a copy of the first full book I ever wrote, The Flying Swallow Club, which I bound into a ‘proper’ little book with illustrations traced from Ladybird books about birds. I was about 10 and I remember asking a boy in my class (who I really liked) how fast he thought swallows could fly. This was fortunately a long time before I became aware of the differences between African and European swallows.

2. By the time I was about 11, I owned around 350 books, all catalogued in a card index. Well over a hundred of those were by Enid Blyton. I even owned a date stamp so I could run my own library and lend them out to friends - there are still a couple of books I regret never getting back (Prince Caspian was one of them, though I bought a replacement years later).

3. Every time I see an apostrophe out of place, I have the urge to get a pen out of my bag and correct it. I don’t though, because my friends would be horribly embarrassed. But the urge is always there.

4. Since the start of 2006, I’ve been logging everything I read - which is why I started this blog, in fact. The logs used to be weekly, but they’ve become monthly this year, since I started taking my blogging more seriously. They’re probably not very interesting reads, but I find them useful to see what I’ve read; there are far too many half-remembered books in my head.

5. And most of those half-remembered books date back to when I discovered that the SF/fantasy shelves were right next to the Young Adult ones in the main library, after I graduated from the children’s library at the age of about 12 or 13 - and thus was triggered a lifelong love of those genres.

6. I used to read my mum’s library books, 10 or 20 pages at a time when I could sneak a look at them. Some of them were way too old for me, but I don’t think any serious harm was done.

7. And in other library-related trivia, I was once a member of six lending libraries simultaneously (not even counting the one that consisted of my own books, stored at my parents’): my university library; the fiction library in my university college/hall of residence; the library in my home town; the library in the city nearest my home town; the library in my university town; and the library in the town where I lived when I was at university. I could only take books out of a maximum of four of them though, as my university was a couple of hundred miles from home.

8. This one is something I’ve mentioned before on this blog, in passing: I don’t like editing my poetry. Stories and novels, yes, those have to be edited… but I like my own poems to be ephemeral, to represent a particular state of mind or being, without being changed into something else by hindsight. (Although I will correct bad spelling or typos, of course.)

I think that’ll do for now? I’m going to be lazy and not tag anyone specifically, because a lot of you have probably seen this meme before (though I’m sure it was only seven things last time I did it). But if anyone decides to have a go, leave a comment!