beccastareyes

Comment "WORDS" to this entry and I will comment back with five words I associate with you. Then you post this in your journal elaborating.

Here's what

padparadscha gave me

Astronomy -- my career and favorite branch of science. I've been interested in astronomy since I was a little girl, but it warred with other branches of science until high school. (I used to want to be a marine biologist or a geneticist. I totally blame a subscription to Sky and Telescope getting me back into the astronomy thing. That and Mars Pathfinder and Comet Hale-Bopp.)

I am always willing to talk astronomy with people. Especially (other) writers -- my friend Ann knowingly directs a lot of 'I am a SF writer...' type questions we get on Ask an Astronomer. (I also get the 'I saw something in the sky', since I can generally be trusted to actually answer those.)

Writing It's funny. I did a lot of required writing as a kid, but I never gave much thought to it until high school. We have a picture drawn by a caricature artist at the State Fair when my sister, Jenn, and I were in middle school. Back then, I wanted to be a vet and she wanted to be a children's book writer, so the artist went with that. Now, I'm the one who writes and she took a bunch of pre-vet courses before going from pre-vet to animal behavior to behavioral psychology. (I'll have to ask if she still writes. She surprised me a couple of years ago by picking up a crochet hook again -- Mom taught us both, but she never took to it.)

I picked writing (back) up in high school when I started reading SF. Around that time I also discovered that you could write fanfiction from someone Jenn and I met at summer camp -- she had a Star Trek Mary Sue, but it was good enough to show me that there wasn't any reason you couldn't play in other peoples' verses. (I never wrote down my self-insert, but I had a whole timeline that later turned into a multiverse. There were a couple of clippings of that I used in my webcomics, believe it or not.)

Slayers Slayers has been one of those things that I am shocked I'm still into. I mean, normally I'd go through phases of things, yet, somehow, I keep coming back to it. Maybe because it hits my sweet spot between comedy and drama -- it's a funny series that can also handle serious plot arcs. (I've found a couple of series that do this well -- Avatar is one on the more dramatic side, as is The Dresden Files. Discworld does it too, but I don't have much of a fannish creative urge towards it -- I'm not sure why.) It also has good characters that have a bit of depth to them, and a cast of strong female characters.

Fandom I am such a fan. I don't know why so much of my creative energies are focused along fandom lines. Perhaps because it makes writing and art much more social, or because I am chronically filled with the 'what if?' urge. That and I've found fandom to be a mostly-friendly place, aside from the occasional crazy and the urge to roll my eyes at some people. (Not on this journal.)

Gaming I am such a gamer. Another thing I picked up in high school, from

eiviiaru, who was my first GM. I also have a pretty large breadth for games, I've noticed -- any video game that doesn't require coordination, RPGs ranging from glorified board games to collaborative writing projects, and occasionally board games. Some of it is just a social thing and it requires a lot of different kinds of thinking. Plus, it's a way to make writing a group activity.

I also have a bit of a simulationist streak in that I will develop conversions for settings for any system I own. I should put some of those up on the web, to go with the Big List of Slayers d20 Spells I have on my site. And it lets me indulge in worldbuilding to no end. I am a sucker for worldbuilding.