Saturday, January 27, 2007

I've Been Tagged!

Today I planned to finish up the discussion on editing your manuscript. It’ll have to wait, though. Yesterday I got tagged.

That doesn’t mean my husband put me in a yard sale for fifty cents. Not yet, anyway.

David Bowles of Writing the Westward Sagas tagged me. In blog-talk that means I’m now “it” in an online game of tag. I have to write five things that you may not know about me. Then, I have to tag five other bloggers. And the game spreads across the internet.

Here are the rules of the game:
Each player of this game starts with the “5 little known things about you”. People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 5 unusual things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 5 people to be tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave a comment that says “you are tagged” in their comments and tell them to read your blog.

This was not an easy assignment for me. I’ve been writing a weekly e-newsletter for 8 years now and started daily blogging last year. I’m a fairly open book already.

1) I grew up in a household of women: my mother and four girls. Actually, though, it was three girls. I don’t really remember my oldest sister living at home since she left when I was five and that was about the time my youngest sister was born. As kids, the three of us did not get along. We fought and argued all the time. My sister, Cathy, once told me to shut up. I didn’t, of course. She told me to shut up or she’d knock the snot out of me. I didn’t. So she did … knock the snot out of me. Another time we were fighting and somehow in the scuffle I bit the metal rail on the bunk bed. Cracked my tooth. It’s still missing the corner. Surprisingly though I don’t have that many childhood scars. And the three of us get along fine now.

2) I’ve lived in Texas most of my life. My mother moved us here when I was ten. You ask people overseas or even New Yorkers and they’ll tell you Texans ride horses or drive pickups with gun racks. So not true. Sure, we have cowboys and gun-toting pickup drivers, but we’re also city-fied. I’ve never shot a gun. I did go deer hunting with my husband once years and years ago. He left the blind for a few minutes and let me hold the gun. With the safety on. Across my lap. Turned away from his direction. Did I mention I was not to turn off the safety?

3) Friends know I have curly hair. But I didn’t always have curly hair. It used to be straight. Seriously. Straight as a board, as they say. In high school, I was always putting my hair in rollers or sleeping on wet hair in pin curls. Within an hour of styling it, it’d be flat. My sister was always ironing her hair to try to take out her curls. Then, something happened. I had kids and my hair began to curl. First waves, then curls. Tighter and tighter. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but there are still times when I miss my straight hair.

4) One time in a screenwriting class, the assignment was to write a short scene about something that happened in your life. When I finished reading mine aloud, half the group looked shocked as if they wanted to cry; the other half looked skeptical as if they thought I’d made it up. The reactions surprised me because I thought the story was really funny. When I was seventeen I left home for college. Not long after I did, my mother left Lockhart and moved into a trailer. I would go home on occasional weekends. One weekend, I drove into the trailer park and discovered that the only thing left was the steps that used to lead up to her trailer. She’d moved. I had no idea where she or my younger sister had gone. They’d just pulled up stakes and left. Without a word. Now, that’s funny, right?

5)Lastly, if you’ve read my bio, then you know I was a mermaid for three years. What you may not know is what that entailed. For three years (the place was open every day except Christmas day) I jumped into 68 degree spring-fed water. Even when the catwalk iced over, I swam. I could do synchronized underwater ballet and hold my breath for two to three minutes. You could always tell who were the rookies and who were the seasoned performers: the rookies would flash through the ballet moves and grab their air hoses before the rest of us could finish our first reverse split. I can eat and drink and blow air rings underwater. I can swim in a mermaid tail – and that’s not easy folks. I can talk underwater. The mermaids used to sit on our lily pad perches during picnic and talk to each other. I’ve swam with a pig, with several pigs, actually, and I’m not talking about the guys in the show. And I have a couple of postcards to prove my mermaid days. In one I’m standing on the volcano in the show area. In the other, I’m on top of the submarine in which the audience sat to watch the show. Being a mermaid didn’t pay much, but it was fun.

That’s it. My secret talents and stories. Well, not all of them. But enough for now.

Speaking of “now.” I now tag the following bloggers:
Robert Giron at Chez Robert Giron
Todd Glasscock at Exile on Ninth Street
Susan Wittig Albert at Lifescapes
Cynthia Leitich Smith at Spookycyn
Sherry Thomas at Plotters and Manipulators United

Tell us five things we don’t know about you.

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