Behind The Scenes

This week we're moving slightly away from my usual poetry and fiction and joining in on Kayleigh Fraser's Get To Know Me challenge.

For this post, I'll be sharing ten fun facts about me. These took a bit longer to write than I expected, since I tend to struggle to figure out what to say when I have to talk about myself, but I hope you find them interesting!

1. Neil Young was playing when I was born. This is a story my dad likes to tell me. He used to make mix CDs for my mom (and later on, for me and my brothers as well) and they had one of them playing in the hospital room when my mom was in labour. Harvest Moon by Neil Young was playing on it when I came into the world.

To this day, it's one of my favourite songs.

2. No one knows how I learned to read. My primary teacher and my parents both assumed the other had been teaching me because by age five I was already a much more advanced reader than my classmates. Personally, I don't think I remember not being able to read.

The fact that my reading and writing skills were a grade ahead of the grade I was actually in would be a bit of a problem for me all through elementary school. I was bored a lot.

3. I'm a very crafty person. My mom would do a lot of craft projects with me when I was a kid and I started learning to knit when I was around 11 or 12 maybe? I started by making clothes for my stuffed animals and Barbies and gradually worked my way up to human-sized things. Now I not only knit, I also crochet, embroider, cross stitch, latch hook, and a bit of macrame, and am trying to learn to sew more. I have yet to meet a fiber art that I don't take to.

4. My favourite video game series is Kingdom Hearts. My dad got Kingdom Hearts II as one of my chore jar prizes when I was a kid and I fell in love with it very quickly. The combination of Final Fantasy and Disney hit my interests very well. I cried while playing Kingdom Hearts III after waiting for it for so many years. I'm also working on writing a TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying game) inspired by the series.

5. Oh, yeah. I design TTRPGs. I have designed one supplement for the game Down We Go and two one-page superhero romance games, all of which are available through ko-fi and itch.io. I'm also currently working on my Kingdom Hearts inspired game and a journalling game inspired by The Lady of Shalott.

6. I also host a TTRPG podcast. It's basically an excuse for me and my friends to try to play some of the games we've collected but never gotten around to. It's been a lot of fun and we've played some really interesting games. You can check it out here.

7. My knees dislocate themselves out of the blue. I have an alignment problem where my hip bones are too big for the rest of my lower body. You can't tell it just by looking at me, but the angle of the ligaments on my kneecaps is off by a bit because of it and will sometimes cause my kneecaps to come out of place. It thankfully happens less often now than it did when I was still growing, but it's still very painful and not fun.

8. I love to write outside, especially my first drafts. I find that I focus on the writing better when I just take a notebook and set myself up at a park or on the boardwalk for a bit and just jot things down.

9. I love ghost stories, but hate horror movies. I can sit down with a book of ghost stories from some particular area and fly through it in utter fascination, but I cannot handle watching horror movies. Somehow, "real" accounts don't scare me as much as fictional ones.

10. I love holidays. I won't try to force the celebration on anyone else, but I absolutely go all out for any holiday with decorations and activites. Christmas especially is a big one for me.

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