name game

[katekat]

tagged by lorelei_frolick (whose username is way more interesting than mine)

Rule: Post the explanation of where your user name came from. Then tag FIVE users whose explanations you would like to hear. If you are tagged, post your explanation to your page.


It's so sad.  I have zero imagination.  My name's Kate.  I was feeling particularly kittenish at the time (in college) and love the letter K way better than I do C.  so I became kate+kat.  At the time someone else thought of this highly original name (yeah, whod've thought?) and so I needed to append some numbers to it or come up with something more interesting.

Sadly I hadn't yet discovered my favorite alter ego, from the book by Helen DeWitt (if you can guess, i'll give you a gold star and a graphic of your choice) -- so instead, I appended my birthdate: 10/10

and there you have it.  katekat1010.


and, if they accept it, i tag:
elizabuffy , blueanddollsome , kikucutie , shehasathree , lilianvaldemyer

Comments

[biodamped]

Awww, man. My update page refuses to load, so here you go!

Lillian - i decided when i was 10 that i'd write a book, and that i wouldn't use my real name. I don't remember WHY i picked Lillian, i just liked it.

Valdemyer - i was telling the story of how i wanted to be a writer one day at work, and we decided that i needed a cool surname. Valdemyer was (i think) the name of a wizard in some fanasy series one of the girls had read years before, and i fell in love with it, cos it sounded mysterious and Elizabethan. :)

And it's lilianvaldemyer because lj has a 15 character limit and wouldn't let me have the second L. I think my very post post was a bitch about that, in fact.

[gray-ghost.livejournal.com]

Hmmm....let me think....starts with an S......and you have probably pissed off a couple of thousand DeWitt fans who were hoping to snag that particular nick when they got their shiny new gmail accounts =) =)

[elizabuffy.livejournal.com]

Hee! I was totally baffled until you gave me that little clue *grin*

~e! (who's never read a DeWitt book)

[soft-princess.livejournal.com]

Your birthday is three days before mine! (I have known so many people with that birthday in my life, lol.)

*squishes* :D

*twirls you*

[blueanddollsome.livejournal.com]

??? to the DeWitt book.

Anyhoo, my answer is here: http://blueanddollsome.livejournal.com/31244.html

[katekat]

i don't think there are actually 1000 DeWitt fans. But yep, I scooped 'em all!

[katekat]

AWW! Hello fellow libra! *squishes you back*

[katekat]

It's this book that I absolutely adore... called The Last Samurai (nothing to do with that movie - absolutely *nothing*)

And *smacks forehead* I'm sorry I missed your post earlier! I dunno what was going on... busy scrolling finger or something. Thanks for linking me!

[katekat]

hmm, that seems to have happened to a couple of the people on my flist last night.

BUT YAY! Thank you for illuminating me - I like your explanation! It's funny, there's a fantasy series that has a country named Valdemar and for a couple of minutes I thought that's what you were talking about - but then I realized that the books i'm thinking of probably took their name from the book you're thinking of!

[katekat]

she's only written one ... and you should read it! it has math in it! math is good! :D

[biodamped]

oooh, what series? Fantasy is my little area - at work nobody else even TOUCHES the ordering for the fantasy stuff, they just leave it for me. Which is at once lovely and irritating. But at least this way i know what we've got and that it's good.

[katekat]

it's not one of the greatest, but i read it when i was young and impressionable:

Mercedeys Lackey's Valdemar-Verse

who are your fav fantasy authors?

[biodamped]

I just finished Sarah Monette's Melusine series (the two so far, anyway) and she's currently number one. :D If you like intriguing and well-written stuff with multiple complex plots, highly detailed magical concepts, and aren't squicked by gay/incest/rape/abuse scenes (it's kind of heavy in some parts, but always tasteful), i highly recommend it.

Otherwise Robin Hobb, George RR Martin, Cecelia Dart-Thornton, the Tolkiens (obviously), good old JK Rowling. I'm also fond of Sara Douglass, Manda Scott, Stephen Lawhead, Fiona McIntosh, Russell Kirkpatrick... my list is pretty endless.
Oh yeah, and i have an embarrassing love of Weis & Hickman's Dragonlance novels, and a fair few of the Forgotten Realms ones. *lame* :">

[katekat]

OOO! *bounces* What fabulous recs!

Thank you for the names, because i've been hesitant to get into newer fantasy lately (too many disappointments). I adore GRR Martin, Tolkien, Rowling, but haven't heard of the other people you mention (but the Monette also rates really really high on another one of my friend's book lists - so that's two recs! which makes me doubly excited about it).

and about the dragonlance novels... it's totally ok. i've not only read those, i've actually re-read David Eddings novels more than i can count. they're the series i reread when i get sick and want comfort fiction.

[biodamped]

I know what you mean. I try to read a lot - i have a proof copy of Jennifer Fallon's new one, i'll let you know what it's like, cos she's another good seller - being that i get free copies and it's easy when you work there, but i'm a really fussy reader, and when i'm reading 15 plays for one class and about 10 for another, it's hard to put up with the stuff that's bad.

Monette is brilliant. I can't even put words to how brilliant her construct is. Half of it's still unexplained, the series has another 2 books to go (one due August this year, and one she's still writing), so we're guessing some stuff, but she just has such RICH characters and settings. Another one of my guilty fascinations is Elizabethan and Renaissance court life, and this is at one so like that and so removed, and just GUH. I adore it. Her main character, Felix, has eaten my soul. Loads of people seem to hate him, for some reason - i'll let you make your own mind up when you read it, but i love him to pieces.

As for the others - i'd be really surprised if you HAD heard of them. Garth Nix is a South Australian writer, he won the Teen Fantasy award a few years back for his Old Kingdom trilogy. It's not teen precisely, but certainly anyone over 16 would be able to read it. He has a few series for younger kids, but i'd start with Sabriel. Cecelia Dart-Thornton is another Australian writer, who's in the middle of her second series. I haven't got much into it, but her forst one - The BItterbynde Trilogy - was entirely brilliant. The ending drove me nuts because it wasn't what i wanted (she gave me a small hope, but it still wasn't right and i sulked for weeks after :P) but the books themselves are adorable. It's very much fairytale fantasy. As for Fiona McIntosh, i think she's also Australian; she and Sara Douglass write more historicaly based fantasy. Sara's got one she's finishing off that's set in Troy. And Manda Scott, the last one i mentioned, has an excellent series about Boudicca, which reminds me very much of Marion Zimmer Bradley. Not the style so much as the very historically based premise.

Oh, yes! Mists of Avalon, another of my all time faves. Can't believe i forgot that. XD
And that's enough raving from me for now. I guess you can see why they leave the fantasy to me...

[blueanddollsome.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a very interesting book. Something else for my "to read" list :)

[katekat]

(belatedly catching up with comments)

ooo! it is a delightful book! if you do pick it up and read it you have to tell me what you think!

[blueanddollsome.livejournal.com]

Will do!