Bored? Talk to me. I like to talk. Sometimes I talk too much, and people yell at me to shut up.
Name: Garen (not really, but that's another story)
Titles: High Priest of Loki, Almost Big Brother to Ginny, Resident History Buff, Spelling and Grammar Nazi, Gavroche Incarnate, Valiant Little Tailor, Heir to the Kitchen Cynic, Anime Club Village Idiot (and if you've got an idea for another one, I will happily hear it and add it to the list)
Birthday: February 23, 1988 (and now that you know, I'll being expecting presents-- booze!)
Likes: Beer, mead, books, fantasy, playing blockflute, artichokes, swords, sewing (laugh and I'll throw my wooden cheese at you), history, fan-mail, acting, Renfaires, wooden cheese, rubber chickens, people who put up with my ridiculously long list of things that I like, meat, apples, stories, singing, and writing bad poetry.
Dislikes: People who are randomly mean, having things thrown at me, waking up early, high schoolers, netspeak, people who use netspeak in a non-satirical manner, tomatoes, onions, garlic, zucchini, peas, bunny-huggers, my kid brother, and reviewers who leave one sentence saying that they like something without saying anything else.
Things you should know: I absolutely detest Eragon, Christopher Paolini, and everything connected with them. Having read Eragon (and finished it, might I add), I have seen no evidence that Paolini is anything other than a spoiled hack who wrote a bad Star Wars/LotR crossover and then said "Mommy! Daddy! Look what I did!" and got published because Mommy and Daddy have a publishing company. You may say that I'm just saying this because I'm jealous. Well yah, I am jealous. I'm jealous that he was homeschooled, and therefore had time to write his idiocy instead of putting up with the drama of high school. I'm jealous that he has parents who own a publishing company, enabling him to be published in spite of having no talent whatsoever. He says he started his book when he was fifteen. Well, he finished most of it when he was eighteen or nineteen, which is not nearly as impressive. Take a gander at some of the stuff I've written. Pop over to my FictionPress account. Look at the dates, and compare them to my birthday, which is listed above. I was writing serious (though mostly on the humorous side), original stories during my sophmore year of high school, the same age that Paolini was when he "started" writing Eragon. I don't think I'm being vain when I say that my work at fifteen was better than his at nineteen. And I'm not even getting into the internal contradictions and just plain stupidity of the actual books. Suffice it to say that when I see Eragon-related stuff on display somewhere, I tend to get angry and rant. This has been heavily documented and has become a source of comedy for a few individuals, which I see as neither here nor there.
I get especially angry when I'm in a bookstore, and they've got one of those "New Books for Young Adults" displays up, with Eragon and the stupid high school sparkle!vampire romance Twilight spin-offs competing for space with real actual books like the Redwall series, or the works of Charles de Lint and Holly Black. De Lint and Black both write modern fantasy, with a focus on faeries and the like and how they might interact with humans in the modern world. Both are exceptionally skilled writers who create feasible, living worlds through their stories. The sparklepire books paint a cleaned-up, dumbed-down version of both high school and vampires, turning what has traditionally been an evil and fearsome creature into yet another incarnation of the "mysterious bad boy" cliche that has been so very overdone by trashy romance novels. Another pet peeve is when they stick the fantasy stuff and the science fiction stuff in the same category. They are different. Science fiction has bizarre happenings that are explained by mathematics and obscure laws of physics. Doctor Who is a good example of this. Fantasy has bizarre happenings that are explained in a spiritual/religious manner (religious in this case meaning something that has to do with believing in something that some people may question, and not necessarily having to do with Christianity-- sorry if I'm bursting your bubble, but Christianity is not the only religion), such as magic. It's all in the explanations, people.
Okay. The rant is over. You can come out from behind the chair now.
I love getting emails and IMs, so feel free to drop me a line if you want to talk. My AIM is garenthehalfling, all one word, all lowercase. I am almost always online and ridiculously easy to get ahold of. (Just ask Ginny.) I try to answer reviews and emails as much as I can, but be warned that I often get sidetracked and end up typing epic-length messages full of obscure references to half a dozen things that you may or may not have heard of. Exhibit A: this profile.
In regards to my fanfics: I'm afraid I'm much better at writing one-shots than chaptered stories. The only chaptered stories on here that are finished are A Key Round His Neck and Tillie Shakes, and it's looking like those are going to be the only ones I ever do finish. As you can tell from my fanfics and reviewing habits, I skip around a lot.
Go read Ginny's fics. They're posted under NewsieGoil1899 and Mistress of the Midnight Darkness. I've got original stories and bad poetry on my FictionPress account, which is the same as the one on here. The "my website" link will get you there in a click.
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