Five Facts About Me

About two weeks ago I was tagged by Liesel K. Hill in another one of these blog challenges, but then I went on vacation and forgot about it. But today I finally got around to finish it.

So here you go: Here are 5 random facts about me!

1. I married my high school sweetheart. Who says there's no such thing as true love? We've been together almost 18 years and have been married for 11, still going strong. Not sure if this will colour the relationships of characters in my writing, but I'm not going to complain about having a happy home life. :-)

2. I studied to be a theatre professional. I went to school to be an actor, but the fine folks at York University in Toronto beat that out of me. I am still a ham and love to perform, but I didn't want to be an "Actor" in the way that they taught. I completed my Bachelor of Fine Arts, but specializing instead in technical theatre, stagecraft and design. I was going to be a stage manager or a technical director, but when I graduated I felt I needed more supervisory experience and a regular paycheque, which leads me to...

3. I worked at Kinko's for 7.5 years. It was still "Kinko's" when I started. I was there for the FedEx buy-out and the transition to "FedEx Kinko's" and ultimately "FedEx Office." For those of you outside the USA, Kinko's was the ubiquitous copy shop on every street corner through the 90s and into the early 2000s. Any time you see a character in a movie or TV show go to a copy shop, it's a Kinko's or a parody of it. It's like the McDonalds of copy shops. The best thing about working there is that I have SO MANY stories about weird and interesting customers and experiences that I will have fodder for books for many years to come.

Also, in case you're wondering, I never went back to theatre.

4. I'm a big table-top gaming nerd. This should be obvious to anyone who has poked around my site (or especially my other site), but I love role-playing games (like Dungeons & Dragons) and board games (like this or this - Monopoly is not a game, it's an exercise in futility). I just need to clarify that "table-top" games are exactly that - games you play around a table with friends using pen-and-paper and game boards and dice. I'm not a video-gamer - I've hardly played video games in years.

I love and am fascinated by the design and structure of table-top games. How and why the rules work, how the interact with each other, the probability of die rolls and card draws. In another life I probably should have been a statistician or actuary, though honestly it would probably have only used my skills to be better at games.

5. Most people are surprised to discover I'm from Newfoundland. Newfoundland is the Eastern-most Canadian province and has a long and storied history. It was first visited by Europeans (the Vikings) some 500 years before Columbus, and was the site of some of the earliest "official" European exploration and settlement. My family lived there for many generations and I was born and raised there until I was 18.

The reason people are surprised to hear of my background is because I really don't fit the typical stereotype of a Newfoundlander. We "Newfies" come from a long line of hard-drinking fishermen with colourful accents. My family tree is full of them, on both my mother and father's side. Me? I hate fishing and boats, barely drink, and my accent is pretty non-existent (it's there, but quite faint). Why am I so different than the rest of my family? Who knows, but I'm still proud of my heritage and its history and would love to tell you some stories sometime.

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So that's 5 things you may or may not have known about me. I'm probably supposed to tag someone else on this but I'm not going to bug anyone right now. They're probably on vacation, too!