7 things, from rivertempest
I asked the lovely rivertempest to give me seven things to talk about. I shall happily do the same for you if you so desire.
Here's what I got:
Writing
Fandom
Japanese
The Beatles
French Horn
Tori Amos ( WIN!)
Illustrating
Writing:
I started writing in earnest when I was about 12. Nothing too impressive. I tried writing a Harry Potter fanfic, because at the time I was annoyed with all fanfic being romantic in nature (believe it or not). I wrote a Beatles self-insert fic when I was 13 and it actually wasn't too bad. Since then I've been honing my skills, as it were. To date my best pieces of work are Nothing More, which I cannot be bothered to link to, but that was a Lily Luna/Hugo affair, and Nothing More, an Albus/Asteria fic. I've also been dabbling with an original HP fic idea I have, and some original stuff featuring six kids in a British boarding school. I haven't done much on those in the past year, but I guess I can get cracking on them again now.
Writing is an outlet for me, I guess. I love it, but it is tricky to get the words to work for you in a nice way. You want to tell a story but the language is your tool for that, and the more effectively you wield it the better and more memorable the story is. I'm working on it. :)
Fandom:
As a geek (if a somewhat lazy one) fandom is very much my thing. Harry Potter is probably the only fandom I can call myself an active participant in, but I did once dabble in Beatles fandom (that was a John/Paul fic or two too much for me), and I love My Little Pony enough to engage in occasional discussions about toy collection, but I'd like to humanise the characters and write fic about them. I might consider doing that this summer. But yeah, I love fandom. Tis good shit.
Japanese:
...yeah, this us a story for the ages. I first got into it in kindergarten, where we learned a few words and I was good at remembering them. From then on I knew I wanted to be fluent.
I then started learning for realsies when I was 13 (so, 10 years ago). I studied it for four years, then went on a ten-month exchange where I had more experiences, in such a different country to my own, than I could have hoped for. I then finished my HSC in Japanese, then moved to England and have just completed a degree in Japanese (and Linguistics!) at Sheffield, which included another 10-month exchange.
It's very fulfilling wing able to speak another language. I still haven't, in my opinion, reached my ultimate goal of being fluent. But I'm not bad, and I can converse with Japanese people easily. But more than that, Japanese has given me opportunities and opened my eyes to a world that I would not otherwise have had access to. My degree was a bitch, and I'm quite bad at learning foreign languages, as it turns out, so I will probably not get as high a class of a degree as I could have got had I done straight linguistics, but I also would not have come to Sheffield had I not studied Japanese, and that would have been a tragedy. Nowadays Japanese is so engrained in me that I can't really imagine life without it.
The Beatles:
In year 7 I went through my first Harry Potter craze. In year 8 it was the Beatles' turn to distract me from the world. I fell hopelessly in love with them, particularly Paul, and for ages after that they were just about all I thought about. I wrote about them, took books about them to school, learned by heart pretty much all of the lyrics to their songs.
Nowadays I've forgotten many of those lyrics (or at least their order), but they remain my favourite band and my musical taste often depends on how similar a song is to some Beatles song I know.
French Horn:
Japanese is one of the things that I can't imagine not having in my life now. The French horn is the other. It was the third instrument I learned to play (after piano and flute, neither of which I played very well), and I started because I was playing flute in the concert band at school, and the conductor, a horn player, said that there were some instruments that needed more players, and he looked rather directly at the flutes when she said this. I thought to myself, well, if I learned horn, then the conductor could be my teacher. Te conductor first said that a few people were interested in the horn, and maybe I'd be interested in trombone or something. The trombone is in base clef, and I was therefore not interested. But I persevered and eventually she let me learn horn. That turned into 11 years. I'm not very good because I have no confidence, but someday I'd like to do an 8th grade in it, and then settle and play for a community orchestra.
Knowing how to play the horn got me into a wind band in Japan, and into wind orchestra in Sheffield. I've gone to the gold coast, Barcelona, Germany and now Holland with my horn in tow. I've performed in theme parks, villages, churches, cathedrals... lots of places, basically. All of these opportunities I've had, thanks to being a horn player. I definitely wouldn't have done it differently.
Tori Amos:
I have to admit, I'm not an enormous fan of hers. I like her, and I think that as an artist she's extremely talented, and I like a lot of her songs. But I don't actively participate in Amos fandom or anything like that. She is, however, the source behind my lj name, and also indirectly the source behind my fat activism (future) blog and name, Fatshion Hustlings and fatshion_hustler, respectively. Tori has a song called Teenage Hustling, and I really liked it at around the time I got this lj. I was also a teenager back then, so the name fit. Nowadays...not so much, except that in many ways I'm still like a teenager. Anyway, that's the Tori Amos story.
Illustrating:
I want to become a better drawer. I've been drawing on and off since I was in Japan (apart from drawing as a kid of course) seven years ago. But I have never done it really really seriously. Ultimately I'd like to become good enough to draw things for people as gifts and illustrate my own writing. I love art, mainly, in it's many formats, and I want to be able to create more of it.
So, that's me. Who's next? :)
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