Eight facts

Snail tagged me with the eight-facts-about-you meme. I'm supposed to post the rules first so here they are:

1. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Not that I want to be a spoilsport, but I have this thing about chain letters. My husband's rule of the house is never buy things over the phone. Mine is never pass on chain letters. So, I'm breaking the rules. However, if any of you gentle or not-so-gentle readers feel like taking up the meme and running with it, please feel free.

So here are eight facts about me:

1. I was copyeditor of the Australian edition of Cranium, and had to work on a very short deadline. On the last day I had to work almost twenty-four hours straight, and our fridge broke down, and I contracted food-poisoning from some frozen fish, which was good because it meant I didn't have to stop work to eat. Cranium was really interesting to work on -- a lot of fun.

2. My father is Dutch, but I never felt Dutch until I went to Holland in my twenties. I used to hate my Dutch surname, because it seemed so foreign, but now I really like it and wish sometimes I still had it.

3. When I was a teenager, I saw Star wars more than thirty times at the movies and was able to recite the whole film.

4. I had two big disasters in my lab career: I nearly burnt down the lab while doing a Ziehl-Neelsen stain for tuberculosis. After that, my boss never let me do a Z-N again, which was really rough because I had learnt to really, really, really respect fire. My hands ended up blistered, and I melted the new linoleum on the lab floor, but everything else was okay. The second disaster was when I was several months pregnant and accidentally exploded (metaphorically speaking) a three-day collection of faeces over the balcony. My bosses made me clean up the mess, which involved scrubbing out the grouting of the tiles, and I was dry-reaching the whole time. My coworkers formed a semi-circle around me and laughed.

5. I can't sew. At high school I got a D for needlework in Year 7 and the teacher wrote that I was a lovely girl but couldn't cope with the subject.

6. I didn't go on an aeroplane till I was in Year 9 and our school went to Tassie. I really love travelling but can't afford to do any at the moment. In my twenties I backpacked for 18 months, mostly through Europe, north Africa and America. My favourite place was Jerusalem, because I loved the history and mix of cultures.

7. My grandfather played as a ruckman for Richmond, so I'm a Tiger supporter. My second cousin's second cousin is Colleen Hewitt, and I'm as distantly related to Herbie on "Number 96", but can't remember exactly how. He was married to my great-grandmother's someone or other. Something like that.

8. When I was eight, I started a horse novel about a buckskin called Diablo, which I was illustrating myself. In my teens, I wrote 101 single-spaced foolscap pages of an SF novel that drew far too heavily on Star wars. The two main characters had the unlikely names of Chad Durlaine and Lloyd Lancer, and there was a series of planets called Philan, Phileen, Philo -- I can't remember them all, but there were five in all. Looking back over it now, aside from the cliches, I'm surprised that the structure is solid. Starts in media res. Has lots of conflict, rising tension, all of that. But, yes, far too many space opera cliches.

I'll stop there (I had nine but I've deleted one), because I've got off the editing train of my novel this afternoon, and rewritten a short scene. Not quite the 1000 words that I like to write in a day, so I'm off to tackle the next scene before I get too tired.