Seven Somethings, Thanks Anthony

Anthony Venutolo recently handed me this little award.



The rules of the game are to provide seven outrageous facts about yourself. Six are to be lies and one is to be true, or alternatively six are true and one is a lie. I leave it up to you, constant readers, to guess whether most of these are truth or fiction, and guess which is the one that's not like the others. Is only one true, or false?

1. At age nine I turned down the opportunity to co-author a book about dinosaurs with a published author because I was, in my words, “busy working on other projects.”

2. I once took Dante’s Inferno out into the middle of a soccer field during a thunderstorm to see how it would read there.

3. I took a Jane Austen intensive at college because I thought it would be nice to get some of my reading done in the bathtub. Confessing this was probably the first, but far from the last reason that professor hated me.

4. Assigned to recite ten lines of Chaucer and completely unable to cognize Middle English pronunciation, I re-wrote a passage from The Miller’s Tale phonetically and practiced it over fifty times. I wound up doing the entire page, my accent swinging from New Jersey to Latin. I received an ovation.

5. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene convinced me that there was a God (at least one).

6. I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground while bedridden and alone on Easter weekend. I was alternately unimpressed and bemused, and have since felt its influence on literature is because too many healthy people read.

7. The last movie I cried at was Rambo: First Blood Part 2.

Any guesses? Leave them in the Comments section.

Any questions? Why not send them to my RAQ?


Now this award is also supposed to be forwarded on. I'll take a cue from Anthony and distribute it to just three twisted folk.


1. T.S. Bazelli springs to mind. She's been charting what constitutes weird fiction in her blog glossary, from Cyberpunk to Dark Fantasy to Urban Fiction. She's just started a Genre serial, so you can get on at the ground floor.

2. G.P. Ching won this award largely because her name is the most fun to say of any in the modern world. G.P. Ching. G.P. Ching. Say it fast enough and it sounds like you turned "Jeep" into a verb. She also won it because she's got a delightful take on the weird, like god parties and meeting your alien soul mate in the produce aisle.

3. Last is one of my favorite recent discoveries in #fridayflash. Rachel Blackbirdsong meditates on the macabre in ways that don't tick me off. That's hard these days.