Jenny Barber

So, yessssssssss... meme finale day!

Day 10 - One person you can trust
1 - My mum. To the surprise of no-one who's ever met me. :-)



The meme post things:
Day 1 - Ten random facts about yourself
Day 2 - Nine things you do everyday
Day 3 - Eight things that annoy you
Day 4 - Seven fears/phobias
Day 5 - Six songs that you’re addicted to
Day 6 - Five things you can’t live without
Day 7 - Four memories you won’t forget
Day 8 - Three words you can’t go a day without
Day 9 - Two things you wish you could do
Day 10 - One person you can trust

Rolling along nicely....

Day 9 - Two things you wish you could do

1 - Teleport!  This would solve so many problems, and I could do so many things.  Including seeing allllll the places.  (And I'd save so much money when it came to hotel bills!)

2 -  Remember things quickly.  My short term memory is rubbish, my long term memory is even worse.  I live by lists and spreadsheets because that's the easiest way to retrieve things I probably have stored in my brain but would otherwise be vague and noodling around for ages trying to follow the mental links to find what I'm after.


The meme post things:
Day 1 - Ten random facts about yourself
Day 2 - Nine things you do everyday
Day 3 - Eight things that annoy you
Day 4 - Seven fears/phobias
Day 5 - Six songs that you’re addicted to
Day 6 - Five things you can’t live without
Day 7 - Four memories you won’t forget
Day 8 - Three words you can’t go a day without
Day 9 - Two things you wish you could do
Day 10 - One person you can trust

Day 7 of ze meme!

Day 7 - Four memories you won’t forget
Erm, right then. Given that I've got a terrible memory generally, let's give this a go then....

1 - When I was five or six I had this really intense nightmare about vulture monster-men stalking through the house trying to kill people and if you were really still and didn't breathe they wouldn't know you were alive when they bent over the bed to suck the life out of you.  This then segued into them hunting me around some place after a coach had gone off with all the rest of people... and I woke up just as one found me hiding in a garagey place.  A few years later I saw The Dark Crystal and it took a while to realise that the Skeksis were very similar to the original vulture monster-men, though which came first I'm still not sure.

2 - my parents ran a video rental service back in the day.  This was before video rental shops were a thing so we had shelves of videos in our lounge and people coming around to hire stuff.  (We also had some chancer break into our garage cos apparently they thought that's where the stock was kept)  I remember the videos in the posh looking brown library cases, and mum picking films for us to watch.  Well just me, probably, as this would be either just before or just after baby sis was born.  Legend has it that as family businesses went, this one did quite well - at least until one of the suppliers got busted for supplying pirate videos then everybody he sold to got visits from the cops and their stock hauled off as evidence. Mum has forever been bitter that they took the posh cases she'd brought as well as the actual tapes...

3 - Sunrise over the crossing between Ibiza and Formentera when I was about 12 or 13.  I don't remember which way across we were going though it was probably Formentera to Ibiza to catch the plane home.  Anyhoo, it was a tiddly ferry with maybe two dozen tourists crammed in, and I remember it going from dark to a mess of colours bleeding through the sky and part of my brain desperately trying to remember what colours and in what order for later writerly purposes.  The sound went weird too, with the crowd noise going that kind of distant echoey you get when it snows.  These days work means I'm up regularly pre-dawn to see the light change, but nothing yet beats the sight of sunrise over the ocean.

4 - when I first met m' good friend and co-editor Jan, she terrified me.  I was 19ish, it was my first convention, a late 90's Fantasycon in Birmingham, and I'd volunteered to gopher as a way to get past the usual social anxiety and general shyness issues.  Jan and Pete were, I believe, the chairs of that one, doing their last organising before they let some other mug take over, with Jan in charge of general ops stuff.  I think Jan may have been chair of the BFS at that point as well.  So yes, Jan was the boss of everything, fear her wrath!  Stuffing bags I could totally do, raffle-runner was a new one,but doable, ordering drinks from the bar not so much.  And I was a young looking 19 and always getting carded so the barman was reluctant to serve me, which I had to then go back and tell the reg desk crew.  Mortified is not the half of it. (Seriously, you do not go back to Fcon peeps without drinks, it's an executionable offence!) This left me generally feeling like a useless wassock and I hid for a bit.   Fortunately things got better after that. :-)


The meme post things:
Day 1 - Ten random facts about yourself
Day 2 - Nine things you do everyday
Day 3 - Eight things that annoy you
Day 4 - Seven fears/phobias
Day 5 - Six songs that you’re addicted to
Day 6 - Five things you can’t live without
Day 7 - Four memories you won’t forget
Day 8 - Three words you can’t go a day without
Day 9 - Two things you wish you could do
Day 10 - One person you can trust

Annnnnd, it's day 5 of the meme!

Day 5 - Six songs that you’re addicted to

With the proviso that this is this week's list, and addictions are subject to change...
1 - Radioactive by Pentatonix & Lindsey Stirling - a funky electro-classic cover of the Imagine Dragons song
2 - Roundtable Rival by Lindsey Stirling - which is a fabulous violin thingy with a fantastic steampunk western video
3 - Dark Horses by Switchfoot - found on a Merlin fanvid.  Um.  Yes, hands up, fanvids may be where I find a lot of new music.  :-)
4 - My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up) by Fall Out Boy
5 - Lovers on the Sun by David Guetta (featuring Sam Martin)
6 - Silver Lining by Hurts.  Possibly another find via Merlin fanvids. :-)



The meme post things:
Day 1 - Ten random facts about yourself
Day 2 - Nine things you do everyday
Day 3 - Eight things that annoy you
Day 4 - Seven fears/phobias
Day 5 - Six songs that you’re addicted to
Day 6 - Five things you can’t live without
Day 7 - Four memories you won’t forget
Day 8 - Three words you can’t go a day without
Day 9 - Two things you wish you could do
Day 10 - One person you can trust

Er, yes, bit late with this one.  Avalanche on the work mountain, so it was...

Sooooooooo...............

Day 3 - Eight things that annoy you

1 - noisy crowded rooms.  This makes the bar and launches at conventions, and similar, extremely trying. I like space and quiet and being able to hear what people are saying.
2 - drunken people who are possibly being insulting/rude on purpose or just accidentally booze gabby and don't mean it but how can you tell?  I can never tell.  And then I spend months over analysing and getting anxious about it afterwards.
3 - the general habit of pissing on any genre thought to be associated with da wimmins.  Especially urban fantasy. But see also romance and YA.
4 - linked to the above, when a perfectly lovely and talented chap writes a book in the aforementioned genre then the publicity/reviews are all at pains to say loudly and often how it's not like all those other icky [insert genre] books.
5 - the Exceptional Woman character who is surrounded by nothing but menfolks.  Don't get me wrong, I love a kickass lead woman as much as the next person but where are the other women in the story?  Friends, relations, random walk ons.... kateelliott did an excellent post on Tor.com recently that goes into this, go read!
6 - people who insist ebooks aren't proper books
7 - practical jokes
8 - having brainfog days. There's stuff needs doing! Haven't got time for brainfog days!

The meme post things:
Day 1 - Ten random facts about yourself
Day 2 - Nine things you do everyday
Day 3 - Eight things that annoy you
Day 4 - Seven fears/phobias
Day 5 - Six songs that you’re addicted to
Day 6 - Five things you can’t live without
Day 7 - Four memories you won’t forget
Day 8 - Three words you can’t go a day without
Day 9 - Two things you wish you could do
Day 10 - One person you can trust

Crikey, have not blogged for an age.  In my defence, this last module for the degree is a bit of a mare so I'm in hyper-focus mode until June when it will all be over.  (Hurrah!)

But! Until then! Am tiptoeing gently back to blogging with a meme thing nicked from the ever fabulous la_marquise_de_

The meme post things:
Day 1 - Ten random facts about yourself
Day 2 - Nine things you do everyday
Day 3 - Eight things that annoy you
Day 4 - Seven fears/phobias
Day 5 - Six songs that you’re addicted to
Day 6 - Five things you can’t live without
Day 7 - Four memories you won’t forget
Day 8 - Three words you can’t go a day without
Day 9 - Two things you wish you could do
Day 10 - One person you can trust

So! Ten random facts about yours truly...
1 - At age (about-ish) 10 I became a published poet as a teacher at school submitted a poem I wrote about the mail strike to a Berkshire Young Poets competition thing.  Which got me publication in an anthology, my picture in the paper, and me and a dozen other of the prize winners had to read our poems out at a posh do at the Council buildings.  At which I wore the shortest skirt imaginable and spent the whole evening tugging it down...
2 - When I was 9 I broke both my arms by falling off a lo-lo ball but no one realised until a week later when my occassional complaining was getting annoying. My mum, a trained St Johns ambulance bod, could see no swelling or signs of injury and thought I was just making a bit of fuss, and the GP was clueless and thought it might possibly be sprains.  It was only on going to A&E that anyone realised one arm was broken bad enough that I need to be knocked out so they could rebreak it and the other was just a green-stick fracture. The next year when I broke an arm roller skating I was down to A&E within the hour.
3 - I was utterly convinced for a very long time that space fighter pilot was a viable career option.  For this I blame the original Battlestar Galactica.
4 - Given the time and money I would take every course imaginable and do umpteen degrees just for the fun of learning new things.
5 - I have always wanted to speak multiple languages fluently.  I've got a GCSE in Spanish and a few words in French, Italian, Greek and Japanese.  Though I always tend to do the French and Italian in a Spanish accent and get easily confused on simliar words across the different languages.
6 - I'd also like to be able to fluently understand every ancient language in existence.  Alas, my brain has not managed to retain the Ancient Greek I tried learning a couple of years ago. Still, never give up, never surrender!
7 - Given the time and money and vaguely reliable health, I would visit every ancient site in the world.
8 - I've always wanted to have/ride a motorbike - but I've seen my driving and that's just asking for trouble...
9 - I've had a milder form of M.E. since I was a teenager but generally try to ignore it except for spoon budgeting.
10 - I can read music and play drums, keyboard and guitar to varying degrees though it's been a while so I'm rusty on all.  My attempts at playing saxophone were doomed to failure as I couldn't manage the right kind of puff to get a single note out of it.