I\u2019ve been tagged by Bettie Sharpe to cough up seven random facts about myself. So here goes.<\/p>\n
1. I am useless between the hours of 11pm and 7am. You hear a lot about writers who get up at 4am to write before they go to work. When Kidlet #2 stayed at home fulltime with me, I think I tried that a bit. And gave up after 2 days. Nor can I stay up late to write. My brain turns into a pumpkin by midnight. So if you are glad that I\u2019m publishing, you should totally send perfumed love notes to my husband, who never\u2014not once\u2014asked me to get a real job, even though there were times when we really could have used the comfort and security of a second income.<\/p>\n
2. I don\u2019t own a belt. I don\u2019t remember if I\u2019ve never owned a belt, but I\u2019m pretty sure I haven\u2019t had one for the past ten or twelve years.<\/p>\n
3. I went to see Godzilla\u2014yes, the American-made one\u2014twice in theaters.<\/p>\n
4. I don\u2019t watch TV. And it\u2019s not because of any personal disdain for pop entertainment\u2014heck, I work in pop entertainment and have extremely suspect taste in movies (see 3)\u2014but because when Kidlet #1 was small, he was a TV zombie. If the TV was on, he\u2019d be staring at it mesmerized, unable to do anything else. I also hate commercials. But I\u2019ll happily watch TV shows on DVD. I have The Office about to be viewed. Next up, Prison Break.<\/p>\n
5. The word \u201ctrousers\u201d used to be the bane of my existence. As some of you might know, English is not my first language. When I was in fifth grade, and happily ignorant of alphabet-based languages, my grandmother\u2014who, along with my grandfather, had attended an English-medium college in Shanghai in her youth–decided to teach me English at home. Ah, the torment. The sheer WTF-itude of it all. English wasn\u2019t taught at regular schools until 7th grade, why was I always singled out for extra work that I had no desire for doing? But Grandma was a formidable individual and it never occurred to me to dare to refuse. So I submitted to it. But it was slow-going and reluctant and to be honest I sucked pretty hard at it. And I could not spell \u201ctrousers\u201d no matter what. Which is kind of astonishing looking back, because there are a bunch of words that I habitually misspell these days, but none of them \u201ctrousers\u201d!<\/p>\n
6. I compulsively turn off lights whenever they are not shining on someone. Have been that way since long before I’d even heard of global warming or peak oil. <\/p>\n
7. I only wear my wedding ring when I am in an environment teeming with cute guys. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
In other news, the Pay-it-Forward contest is scheduled to open in the first week of February. It will be a post of its own. The prize? A query letter consultation. The contest will remain open until I’m done with my line-edits and can pick a winner–so it’s not for someone in a desperate hurry. \ud83d\ude42 <\/span><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve been tagged by Bettie Sharpe to cough up seven random facts about myself. So here goes. 1. I am useless between the hours of 11pm and 7am. You hear a lot about writers who get up at 4am to write before they go to work. When Kidlet #2 stayed at home fulltime with me, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[48,35],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1577,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions\/1577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}