The Mystery Blogger Award

Within the last month, I’ve been tagged by two separate blogging friends for this award, and since I’m struggling a bit with things to blog about lately (quarantine brain got me good, don’t ya know), I decided now was as good a time as any to finally do this!

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Rules first!

1. Put the award logo/image on your blog. – ⬆⬆ featured image for this post!
2. Thank whoever nominated you and provide a link to their blog – that honor goes to both Amelie of Swordmaiden of the King and Emily of The Altogether Unexpected!! Thank ya, friends!! 😊
3. Mention the creator of the award and provide a link as well. – This award was created by Okoto Enigma.
4. Answer the 5 questions you were asked. – Or ten, in my case.
5. Tell your readers 3 things about yourself.
6. Nominate 10-20 people. – We’ll get to this at the end.
7. Notify your nominees by commenting on their blogs.
8. Ask your nominees any 5 questions of your choice; with one weird or funny question. – Again, we’ll talk about this at the end.
9. Share a link to your best post(s).

(I’m going to answer Amelie’s questions first, since she was the first to tag me for this award, and then I’ll do Emily’s.)

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Questions Round 1

• (for fun) Do you view water as a necessary and even delicious beverage or as a substance that must be avoided at all costs?

I think I’m somewhere between these two extremes. I like water, and I don’t like overly sweet beverages, but I’ll often drink something like lemonade or apple juice if my family has it on hand. However, given the above note of “not liking very sweet drinks,” I usually water these down to about 50% of the usual store-bought concentration. And sometimes I’m struck with a major craving for a glass of ice-cold water.

• What is your favorite book(s) of the Bible?

Oooh. Toughy.

I’d say one of my top favorites is Job, because of its poetic/narrative style. It reads almost like an epic, like Beowulf. But also, I really enjoy the themes in it, of God’s providence and sovereignty, and the incredible smallness of man when compared to the all-powerful, infinite Creator, followed by the reminder of the grace and undeserved kindness our God continually showers on his children. (Right as I began answering this question, the song “Where Were You” by Ghost Ship came on in my earbuds. Which I did not plan at all. If you’ve never heard it, here’s a link to lyric video of the track on YouTube.)

But I also love Psalms, I’ve been reading some of 1 Thessalonians in my morning Bible time, and my favorite Gospel is Luke.

• Do you have a favorite (or a few favorite) movie soundtrack(s)?

My rapid-fire answers as they pop into my brain:

Rogue One, The Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who (especially the last few seasons scored by Murray Gold), The Last Jedi (or pretty much any other Star Wars soundtrack, and especially the ones for the prequels), Avatar, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Game of Thrones.

That list is by NO MEANS exhaustive, but they’re a few of my favorites that I can think of right off. I haven’t seen Avatar or GOT, and I don’t really have any plans to. But they both have amazing fantasy soundtracks that I find very inspiring and a nice change from the LOTR-esque style of much fantasy soundtrack music. (I love all the soundtracks for all the Middle-earth films, don’t get me wrong, but similarly to John Williams’ music, the style has become almost cliche at this point due to overuse by other composers attempting to copy the them.)

• What is your favorite board game?

I actually haven’t played a board game in quite a while! But I’ll be generic this once and say Monopoly. 😂 Yes, it lasts forever, and yes, it can cause irreparable rifts in otherwise close families/friendships, but it can also be so much fun!

• What is your favorite trilogy?

Trilogy of… anything? Wow. That’s a hard question!

Uhhmmmm. I’m going to have to think about this one. 😅

Ok, how about this: my childhood trilogy of fantasy franchises – Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Narnia. There we go. That’s my answer. No, it’s not cheating, leave me alone.

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Questions Round 2

• What was a book that you read as a child that you still have fond thoughts of?

Once again, this is probably going to sound a bit generic, but I have to go with The Chronicles of Narnia.

When I was a child (about six years old, if I remember correctly), a lady from our then-church gifted me a paperback volume of the entire series bound within one cover. I read that whole thing through about 7 times consecutively before my parents finally confiscated it and forced me to read something else. I still vividly remember keeping it under my pillow at all times and reading it at every spare moment, often under my covers at night with a dim, flickering flashlight (which I’m all but sure contributed to my need for glasses shortly thereafter).

• Star Wars or Star Trek?

Noooooo, Emily!! How could you do this to me??! 😱😭

See, here’s the thing: aside from one of the JJ Abrams films and one or two episodes of various other series, the only Star Trek media I’ve consumed a considerable amount of has been the original series (and I’ve seen almost every episode of that). I’ve never cosplayed any Star Trek characters, or attended a Trekkie convention.

So when you compare my “fangirl points” for Star Wars to those of Star Trek, Trek falls pretty pathetically behind. BUT I do enjoy the original series a lot, and I do intend to watch more of the others at some point, and I’ve never been one to encourage the “fandom war” that classically exists between the two franchises.

So if I have to chose between the two, it will have to be Star Wars for me. But I won’t be happy about it. 😛😂

• Have you ever finished a full-length novel, or are you planning to do so soon?

Sadly, the answer to the first part of this question is a big, fat, NO.

And I don’t have any inspiration for anything that big right now, but who knows! I do have a few story/character inspirations bopping around in my head right now, and I’ve been writing a fair amount of fanfiction lately (though it’s admittedly QUITE niche, lol), so if I stumble across an idea that deserves a novel-length story, I’ll definitely start heading in that direction!

• What is your favorite genre to write?

For the most part, fantasy/spec-fic, which is also the genre from which I tend to read/watch/consume the most media. But I also enjoy academic writing a lot more than my younger self would have expected! (but oof, that sounds so pretentious when the most “academic” thing I’ve ever written has been a handful of advanced literary analysis papers and one science research report in 9th grade.) And as I mentioned in my answer to the previous question, I’ve also found myself far more comfortable with and inclined to pen fanfiction lately than in the past, though I’m not sure if that should be considered its own “genre” or not.

• How old were you when you started blogging/writing?

I’ve been dreaming up stories and finding some way to record them ever since before I could use a keyboard. I used to call my Nana up on the phone and dictate little stories to her (which she transposed onto her laptop and likely still has saved away somewhere) when I was just a tiny girl. And I still occasionally stumble across the tattered notebooks I wrote down all sorts of story ideas in (one of my earliest ideas was called “Horse Town,” about a Wild West-style town full of anthropomorphic horses).

But as far as blogging goes, I think I was about 13-14 when I first started The Elven Padawan and began writing with regularity there. (For those who don’t know, TEP was my first blog/my currently-in-hiatus fansite/podcast homepage.)

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Three Things About Me

• I got my hair significantly cut for the first time in YEARS this past fall. It had been at least waist-length for at least 5 years before that, and after I had it chopped, it reached to just a couple inches past my shoulders. After having it this way for the past few months, I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner. And I can’t wait to get it trimmed back into something approaching presentable once quarantine is over. 😂
• I used to feel like time travel in stories was a total cop-out, and couldn’t stand it. I mainly meant this in regards to the way franchises like Marvel Comics would do random, shocking things with their characters to keep the readers entertained, but instead of committing to those choices in the long-term, *BANG! TIME TRAVEL* and it was all undone and everything was fine again. Obviously, I still think time travel (or any other means of “undoing” big things that happen in the development of a story) should be used wisely and with a lot of thought, and not just as a giant, easy-out reset button whenever a decision made simply for shock value doesn’t settle out so well. But in the past couple of years I’ve found myself deeply entrenched in multiple fandoms that use time travel, and I freely admit that I can easily enjoy a well-done time travel story.
• At least 90% of the casual t-shirts I currently own are in some way connected to a fandom, and most of them are Star Wars related. This should not come as a surprise to anyone. 😂

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Nominations

K, so… I have to be honest: basically every blogger I know well enough to tag for this has already done it at least once by now. I really want to follow the rules and tag 10-20 more people, but uhh… I also don’t want to re-tag anyone who’s already done it. So I’m afraid this one dies here with me. Sorry.

https://media.giphy.com/media/p3m5VuvUTyvxQb3PwB/giphy.gif

I couldn’t resist. Da Scronch™  is just too perfect for this situation.

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My best (hah) posts:

Insomniac thoughts no. 1

This is the Way, Walk Ye in It

(I have just realized this blog still doesn’t have many posts on it that aren’t tags or updates trying to explain where I’ve been after several months of unexpected absence. Whoops. But those are my two favorites of the ones I HAVE written and shared here.)

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Thanks again for the tags, Amelie and Emily! And thanks to everyone who reads this! Please talk to me in the comments, I really need people to talk to who aren’t directly related to me, and my family agrees. 😂

Oh, and expect a quarantine edition of The Queue next weekend! I’ve got some pretty cool new books and a mind-bending-but-highly-enjoyable TV series to tell you all about, plus a whole LOAD of Doctor Who audio dramas to recommend. 😁