It nearly didn’t happen again, and it’s going to be a short one because I just saw the time. Eep!
Without further ado, AA 83: Can you tell us one quirky fact about yourself?
This is one of those times when your mind just goes blank. The quirkiest thing I can think of right now is that I’m technically named after my brother.
I’m not even going to say it. Nuh-uh. Straight to the questions this week!
AA 81: Have you ever Googled your name? What did you find that surprised you?
Not recently, but of course I have Googled my name. Most of what comes up is my own publicity – this blog, my Goodreads page, my Twitter feed (which is basically these blog posts). What surprised me most is that there is another author out there whose name is Erica Dakin-Voolich. Here I was thinking that my name was pretty unique, didn’t even bother checking before I started publishing under my own name, and then I came across ED-V.
I don’t know why I still pretend that I write a post every Monday. How many have I missed in the past year? And here I’ve gone and missed two in a row… Okay, I have (as always) excuses. Two weeks ago something happened on Monday (can’t remember what), and since it was both Eurovision week and Masterchef finals week, there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of me catching up on any day after that. Last week I missed Monday because I was catching up with a friend who’d been on holiday for a week, and then I couldn’t catch up after that because my cat had developed a limp. Overnight. I went to bed and he was perfectly fine, I woke up and he was hobbling around like he only had three legs. He’s fine now, but it took three vet visits in total.
Yep, a double entry again. Do I have an excuse for missing last week? Not really. Technically I can blame the cat, who decided to jump on my lap just as I was starting to think about doing my blog post (and it’s impossible to type with a fat cat on your lap), but the truth is it just didn’t happen.
AA 77 is an interesting question though: How do you choose character names?
Oh, this is going to be bad. This is going to be really bad. The question this week is When you look at your oldest writing, what surprises or embarrasses you?
Can I go for the short option and just say ‘everything’? No?
Right. First of all, everything I wrote as a teenager feels like something a teenager would write. It’s melodramatic, over the top, full of ‘woe is me’ angsty shit and teenage rebellion. It is also very clear that English isn’t my first language. In fact, I still notice that in my writing here and there.
This week’s question is really interesting, and for the first time I’m sitting here wishing I didn’t write these on the fly, but had instead prepared for it, because I don’t think I can really come up with a good and proper answer without thoroughly mulling it over first.
For the record, the question is this: If you could take any fairy tale and rewrite it as a full-length novel, which would it be and how would you change it to suit your style?
Soo, the original Authors Answer 74 was an April Fool’s joke. Given that it’s the 3rd of April now, I’m too late to try and put my own spin on it, so once again a random entry this week. Still, if you’re interested in the original post, you can see it here.
Instead I think I’ll talk a little about classical music.
Yes, I’m going to give this week’s AA a miss. Why? Well, the question is this: Jay Dee is moving to Canada in less than a week. In the voice of one of your characters, how would they describe a nine hour flight from Japan to Canada?
Given that I am a year behind on all these AAs, this is not particularly relevant anymore, plus my characters live in a Fantasy world. I would either have to come up with some sort of cross-over story where they are utterly bewildered at being in a big metal tube, or I have to pretend that this might be normal to them. I’m not up to either challenge at present. Instead, I’ll give some random ramblings about my personal experience of moving to a different country.
I could have sworn it was only two weeks ago that Turkish was doing my head in. This confused me, because I do a total of twelve languages at three languages per day, so mathematically it made no sense whatsoever to be at the same language after only fourteen days. Except it was 28 days, which does make sense, mathematically.
And I’m still getting nowhere with Turkish, but hey. On to today’s question!
I am a day late, but this week that was deliberate. I was waiting for the result of a job interview, and yesterday I didn’t have it yet. Next week it would be old news, so I waited until today, which enables me to announce that I was successful!
Whilst this is good news, all it basically means is that I keep the job I was already doing on temporary promotion, so I’m not suddenly getting bucketloads more money. Alas!
Anyway, after that public service announcement, over to this week’s question.
Theft and Sorcery 