In the absence of genuine content, here's a text dump of meme questions via
Diddums. Feel free to pilfer and/or purloin.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
To be loved and appreciated, to be able to create, to feel safe and secure.
2. What is your greatest fear?
Dying horribly in some fashion.
3. Which living person do you most admire?
Aung San Suu Kyi leaps to mind. Most of my biggest heroes seem to be dead.
4. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
It would be a very long list.
5. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Lack of empathy, impatience.
6. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Faith.
7. On what occasion do you lie?
When I want to hide something about myself.
8. What do you dislike most about your appearance?
My hair, I suppose.
9. What is your greatest regret?
Being so sucky.
10. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
A little robot called Cassini.
11. Which talent would you most like to have?
The ability to write publishable novels.
12. What is your current state of mind?
Surprisingly positive.
13. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I'd be more outgoing and confident.
14. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Placing 9th in the TIGSource B-Game competition. Also, I got a degree of some sort or something.
15. If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?
What do I think it would be (as opposed to, in question 35, what I would like it to be)? Something on another planet. A Lovecraftian fungus, drifting in the clouds of a gas giant, contemplating the strange, the beautiful and the horrifying.
16. What is your most treasured possession?
My books and DVDs, I suppose. Or my computer.
17. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Udge had a quote on his sidebar a while back about how there's no worse feeling than the realisation that you are the cause of all your own problems. That sounds about right. And dying a slow, lingering, painful, scary death would be probably be pretty bad too.
18. Where would you like to live?
In a nearby town, which shall remain nameless. It has a castle.
19. What is your most marked characteristic?
Personally, probably diffidence. In conversation or writing, I guess it's, um, I don't know?
20. Who are your favourite writers?
Virginia Woolf, Steph Swainston, Alistair Reynolds, William Gibson, Haruki Murakami, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka. If you can see a pattern here, let me know...
21. Who is your favourite hero of fiction?
Oh man, tough one. Exactly how heroic do they have to be? Oh wait, Nausicaa from Hayao Miyazaki's comic book epic
Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. A great portrait of a strong and compassionate heroine striving to do what's right in a complicated and strange fantasy world.
22. Who are your heroes in real life?
Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Mahatma Ghandi and Aung San Suu Kyi.
23. What is it that you most dislike?
A large umbrella of habits and behaviours that I like to think of as 'lack of imagination'.
24. What is your motto?
You know, I should really get a motto. Okay, Asimov once said something like, “I'll believe anything, however crazy,
as long as there's evidence for it.” That'll do.
25. Favourite journey?
Train from here, heading away from London.
26. What do you value most in your friends?
Their tolerance of my many negative qualities.
27. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
'Seem'. Whenever I write anything, fiction or non-fiction, I have to go back and delete about a million 'seems', 'seemed', 'seemingly' and other variations. It obviously stems from a lack of confidence - I can't just say, “This is so.” but have to phrase it, “This seems so.” It's a great quality for a scientist, but not so useful in a writer.
28. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
Jesus. No, wait, Adolf Hitler. Oh, I can't decide, there are so many. Actually, I've always been surprised by how similar a life H.P. Lovecraft lead to mine. When I die unrecognised and poor, it will be in the certainty that my fiction will go on to just as great a posthumous legacy.
29. What is your greatest extravagance?
I can't believe how much money I've spent on the DVDs of the various incarnations of Ghost in the Shell. I guess I'm also an extravagant time waster.
30. If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
I'd make them both exceedingly rich and exceedingly generous.
31. What is your favourite occupation?
Being creative.
32. What is the quality you most like in a man?
Sensitivity, kindness, understanding.
33. What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Sensitivity, kindness, understanding, glasses.
34. How would you like to die?
Old and happy.
35. If you could chose what to come back as, what would it be?
Someone just like me, only better.