Renaissance Guy tagged me with this meme and so I’m interrupting our regularly scheduled blogramming to bring you this meme.

The rules are:

Link to the person’s blog who tagged you.
Post these rules on your blog.
List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself.
Tag seven random [?] people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting on comment on their blog.

Listing random or weird facts is, well, weird. I think I’ll approach this like a Jungian and post the first seven things that come to my head:

1. I have predicted the gender of the unborn children of over 20 different young women with 100% accuracy.
2. When I was about 12 or 13 years old, I ran naked through a huge wheat field in the pouring rain. It was exhilarating, I can tell you.
3. I can cross my little toes. Before you scoff, just try doing it yourself. You’ll know it’s a gift, then.
4. I am a statistical rarity, with test results on at least five different empirical measures that place me in a 1-2% minority.
5. I have had a handful of dreams that later came true.
6. I have seen several movies over 30 times each, and I still forget parts of them.
7. I know how to take several different types of firearms apart, clean them, reassemble and load them, and use them with exceptional accuracy.

I am tagging these people because I want to know more odd things about them:

1. The Cerebral Mum
2. Beck at Frog and Toad are Still Friends
3. Smiler, at From Smiler with Love
4. Rae, at Journey Mama so that she can have this distraction.
5. Mary Joan at Matriarch
6. Deb at Tired Mummy
7. Nina, at Adoptee Journal

Smiler tagged me with the “5 Strengths as a Writer” meme. Here’s the list of what I think my strengths are:

1. Exacting research, which means I usually know my subject (when writing for publication); the reader gets his or her money’s worth.
2. Exacting research, which means I usually know my market, and hence my publisher; because the publisher gets its money’s worth, I have a 100% publication rate (that is, I sell everything I want to sell, usually to the publisher who is top on my list, but always within my top five choices).
3. Passion. I don’t write for publication any more unless I have a passionate interest or obsession or fascination with my topic. I suppose that I would write hard if I also passionately needed money.
4. Calling. Like many writers, I was called to write from an early age. Our vocational calling makes us persistent cusses, and that means success, eventually.
5. Words. I am wordy. I like words. I use a lot of them in long, Faulkneresque sentences and paragraphs. I am rarely at a loss for words, so editors can count on me to give them words. This is particularly good if one is being paid by the word. This is particularly bad if one is blogging, but oh well.

Veronica at Toddled Dredge is clever, funny, and smart. Among the list of posts she decided not to write was this meme idea:

Ten Literary Characters I Would Totally Make Out With If I Were Single and They Were Real But I’m Not, Single I Mean, I Am Real, But I’m Also Happily Married and Want to Stay That Way So Maybe We Should Forget This

What’s not to love about this idea? Impossible to forget.

In spite of enthusiastic urging from her readers, Veronica is sticking with her decision and won’t offer up her personal snoggable cast of literary characters. Instead, she’s tagged 13 passionate bloggers and asked us to list ten snoggable literary characters.

So, without further ado, the ten literary characters I would totally make out with if I were single and they were real (in no particular order):

1. Howard Roark, in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
2. Terence Hewet, in The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
3. Edmond Dantes, in The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
4. Legolas, in The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien
5. Aragorn, in The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien (who could resist?)
6. Mr. Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (of course)
7. Hawk-Eye in The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
8. George Emerson in A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
9. Lord Peter Wimsey in the Lord Peter series by Dorothy Sayers (top drawer stuff, there)
10. Daniel Deronda in George Eliot’s novel of the same name

I’m looking forward to reading other people’s responses. In the spirit of the meme, here’s a wonderful cinematic kisses video: