The Sweetest Taboo

[alfvaen]

As seen chez csottd:

This is the problem with LJ, we all think we are so close, and we know nothing about each other. I'm going to rectify it. I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me, something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away.

Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you.

Comments

[paigedayspring.livejournal.com]

YOu must have missed where I asked people on my LJ to do this...

So how old where you when you learned to read adn what was the first chapter book you read?

[alfvaen]

I must have missed it...or not been in a memey mood at the time.

This may be a false memory, but I believe that I first read "Heidi" at the age of four. I know that I could read before going to Grade 1, and I was five years old at the time. The identity of the first book is somewhat suspect, though.

[erikred.livejournal.com]

Why do you live in Edmonton? Would you consider living anywhere else?

[alfvaen]

Well, I grew up in Grande Prairie, and lived there happily enough until moving to Edmonton for university. That was where I met Nicole. We moved back to Grande Prairie for a couple of years after I got my Computing Science, and for the most part still didn't mind living there, but I don't mind Edmonton either. For the most part it's contingent, but that fact is that those two cities are the places I am most familiar with, where I know people, where I know how to get around.

I would consider living somewhere else, but only given a good reason to move. I'm not fond of uprooting, nor am I particularly fond of traveling for extended periods. I did go for job interviews in Calgary before the Grande Prairie move, and I'm sure we would have done well enough living there.

Maybe Alberta is the redneck capital of Canada, our answer to Texas, but Edmonton is its cultural centre, and it's pretty much the only place that harbours Liberal voters. There is a certain element of regional pride in not being one of the many who have left the "backward town" of Edmonton to go to Vancouver or Toronto or New York. We're used to the weather--we can survive Alberta winters, in a way that we might not be able to survive, say, a New York summer. Apart from my brother in Toronto, our parents and siblings, are still in Alberta. So if we were going to move, it would have to be for a damn good reason.

[cscottd.livejournal.com]

Since we both list Raphael Carter as an interest...

How did you discover Raphael Carter's writing and what do you like about it?

[alfvaen]

Heh. Well, while I did discover Usenet(and, by extension, the Internet), in 1992, I also spent a lot of time on local text-based BBS systems. The first one I tried seriously was pretty much just local, but it had a great community. After its disappearance, though, around 1994, I shifted over to one that carried a number of Fidonet echoes.

On the SF echo, there were a number of Minneapolis authors--Pamela Dean most frequently, but Steven Brust(who I was already a fan of), Patricia Wrede, and John Ford also put in appearances. Later I discovered the Writing echo, and discovered that Pamela was there as well, and that was where I first made the online acquaintance of Raphael Carter.

Transmission problems meant that I couldn't participate in the echo as much as I wanted to--many of my messages didn't get through to all the posters, for instance--but at the very least I lurked. I watched out for books by most of the people there--I enjoyed Kevin Robinson's mystery novels about a paraplegic detective, I still pick up Billie Sue Mosiman books wherever I see them, and I read Raphael's _The Fortunate Fall_ from the library when it came out. That's been the only work of his that I've ever seen, and I ever violated my own principles to buy it in trade paperback when I discovered it may never get a mass-market release. If you know of any other works, I'd be interested to know of them.

As for what I think of it, check out http://www.telusplanet.net/public/alfvaen/reviews/bottop96.html, when I put it on my Top Books of the Year list. That was when I read it, so I'd say that's more accurate than whatever vague things I might remember about it after eight years.

[cscottd.livejournal.com]

If you know of any other works, I'd be interested to know of them.

I only know of two published works by Raphael Carter:

(1) The Fortunate Fall, novel, 1996.

(2) Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation, short story, 1998. The story appeared in the anthology Starlight 2, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and it also won the 1998 Tiptree Award.

I'd love to see another novel, or at least some more short stories, but if there's been anything else, I'm not aware of it.