Five Things Meme (Again)!

[chomiji]

Once again, it's Five Things! These are from rushthatspeaks, who asked me:

1. Where does your LJ/DW username come from?
I've been into tabletop RPG since 1976, when I went to college and discovered D&D. In the mid 1980s, I was playing in a science fiction campaign that borrowed races and worlds from a plethora of different sources. I decide to play a Mahe, a member of the non-human primate race from C.J. Cherryh's "Chanur" series. To make a character name, I put together a list of all the Mahe names (characters, ships, planets, whatever) I could find in the books, broke them into syllables, and combined things until I found a name I liked (I used to do this sort of thing all the time - it was for me what doing crossword puzzles is for my husband). The rest is history. The footnote to the story is that when I got on LJ, sanada told me that chomiji means "very short" in Japanese. >facepalm<

2. What story of yours have you enjoyed writing the most?
Hmmm ... I feel most relaxed and have the most fun with the short vignettes that seem to come almost of themselves. The one that I remember being the most enjoyable from early days was "Priorities, Male," which is basically just one long joke, but it came out so easily and made me laugh. Most recently, I think that "A Change Would Do You Good" felt right from the very start, even though smilla had to "ground" my action a bit (which often happens), and that was nice, too. Overall, the piece that enthralled me the most was "Down from the Red Hills" ... which worries me now because I wonder if I'll ever have such an all-encompassing writing experience again (it's the longest thing I've ever written).

3. What obscure thing you love do you wish were more widely known?
The novel National Velvet by Enid Bagnold. No one ever reads it but young girls who are obsessed with horses, and that's not really what it's about. It's about family, dreams and ambitions, living life well, and the nature of fame and notoriety. This review in the Guardian covers a lot of what I feel about the story. I also have to say that it contains some of the first writing that made me conscious of the idea that language could be beautiful. In this scene, Velvet has just tried riding the Piebald, who would eventually carry her in the Grand National, and she is returning home on Sir Pericles, one of the horses that she inherited recently under strange circumstances (the Hullocks are the distinctive hills in the area):

... As she approached the village she was outlined against the sunset, on the brow of a Hullock. Stirrups short, angled knee and leg etched on the side of the saddle; childish, skeleton hands waving with the ebb and flow of the horse's mouth on the reins; hands that seemed knotted and tied like a bunch of flowers with streamers going from them, swinging together, knuckle to knuckle, thumb to thumb, while she sat erect above them, her face held on the wand of her body. The straw hair floated and stared above the wide-open eyes.

Sir Pericles walked like Velvet sat. His soft mouth held the snaffle as a retriever carries a bird. Yet he arched his neck as though his bit were a bit of thorns, and his long, almond, Chinese eyes looked both backward and forward at once. He seemed to be watching from either end of the agate stuff that was his window, watching Velvet's leg, watching the horizon before him. The oxygen in the evening air intoxicated him. In the eye of little Sir Pericles something soft and immortal shone.

4. If offered a free and all-expenses-paid hippopotamus as a pet, would you take it?

Oh, no no no! You see, it wouldn't be fair to keep the hippo by itself, so I'd need to get at least one other hippo to keep it company. And then the hippos would need a proper hippo environment. And then I know nothing about keeping them, so I'd have to hire someone who did, and then that person would need a backup in case se got sick. And by the time all this is done, I should just go enjoy the hippos at the zoo and have whoever was offering to pay for my hippo contribute the money to that, instead.

5. What's your favorite smell?
The outdoors in our area in May after a rain, when there is both the fresh watery smell of the rain and the soft scents of the flowers that are blooming - honeysuckle (cloying by itself, but great when mixed), for example, and linden. I wish I could find a perfume that smelled like that. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's "Amsterdam" comes close, but it wears off in no time.