What does your pen name mean? See my explanation.

Do you have any nicknames? Call me Gracie. It's just easier.

What's your location? New England. Born here, plan to die here. But I'll visit other places in the meantime.

How old are you? 26 as of October.

What's your sign? Libra. I'm the fairest of them all.

Do you have any particular lifestyle habits? I'm a semi-vegetarian, or whatever you call the kind who still eats fish. I'm not a bleeding heart for animals, but one day I found that it grossed me out to chew meat, so I stopped. I try to stay healthy, but eat what I crave. No one gets out alive anyway.

If you had a special ability, what would it be? I'd be able to project what I was imagining into a .mov file. Sometimes I can picture something so damn funny, but no one else gets the humour. Or I'm trying to recount something that happened, and again, it's only funny if you witnessed it. Hell, I'll settle for learning how to draw.

Do you have any special talents? I like to think I can write. I also like to think I'm funny. Eye of the beholder and all that, though.

What's your life ambition? To have the most fun and gather the most money while doing the least amount of work. Seriously, I'd love to be an engineer and see to it that everything on the planet is run by solar or wind power, but I barely got through Algebra alive, and I think math only gets harder later on. Doctor? Nope, hate people. We've been fooled into thinking that medicine is just one brilliant lifesaving maneuver after another like on House, M.D. It's not. There's day-to-day stupidity like fighting insurance companies . . . and I'd end up snapping and killing the pregnant teenager who feeds her toddler McDonald's three times a day and wonders why he's sick.

Writing? Well, tried that. It's not glamorous, believe me. There's writing what you want, and writing what they'll actually print and pay you for. AIDS in Africa versus Britney, in other words. So even though I did not leave voluntarily — the trend now is to get rid of staffers and give everything to freelancers with no benefits, etc — I probably would have eventually. It quickly became a horrid chore instead of a calling.

Who is your idol? Don't have one. Don't really believe in idols. What that implies is that there's something wrong with us and that everything's perfect about them. Stop trying to be someone else and work on being a better you. I don't like everything about me, but I'd rather be me than anyone else.

What are you scared of? Chaos. For example . . . when I moved into my last flat, there was this godawfully large and hairy spider the first night. More followed. I just feared the day I'd, like, open the medicine cabinet or nudge a baseboard the wrong way and they'd all come rushing out like in Arachnophobia. I just tend to worry that small things will explode into large things. Like that time the leaky bathtub faucet turned into a burst pipe at four in the morning. 'Course, it was better than if I'd been away and come home to a flood.

Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Definitely an introvert. I hate people. I can't be in a room without wanting to murder just about everyone in it. I fantasize about waking up one day to find everyone but me and a select group has vanished. Like in The Langoliers, but with no langoliers, and the food still tastes good and stuff. Or The Stand, except I'd need a staff to keep the power running and shovel snow and whatnot. But until someone sees fit to hand over control of the globe to me, I'll just settle for going grocery shopping at 2 a.m. and keeping my head down the rest of the time.

What's your biggest pet peeve? It would be a lot easier to list what doesn't tick me off, because that would be the shorter list:

1.

See? Done. My biggest pet peeve insofar as, say, fanfiction? Aside from crackfics with things like "hahaha im drunk" in the summary, clogging up the search engines? People who alert one of my stories, favourite it, favourite me, alert me . . . but don't review. That's like being tackled on the one-yard line.

What's your favourite . . .

Name? I read a list one time, something like "50 Ways to Tell If You're a Teacher," and one of the signs was: "You can't ever have kids, because there isn't a single name that doesn't elevate your blood pressure." I'm not a teacher . . . but between everyone I've met, watched on TV, or read about, I've reached the same conclusion. I like Dain from The Hobbit, but never met anyone named Dain. I like my own name, but I've never met anyone else with my name that didn't piss me off.

I did, at one time, process orders for monogrammed backpacks. I became very irritated with the people who thought they were being all innovative and kewl with their kids' names. "Grayson" (female), "Queen," "Starlight," even "Trojan." Kill me now.

Colour? Pink.

Smell? Patchouli, clean laundry, and simmering applesauce made with red hots.

Weather? Storms, provided the power doesn't go out. I go a little apes**t with no power.

Season? Autumn. Good thing I was born then.

Country? The Seychelles. Never been there, but the brochure looks nice.

Item of clothing? My oversized washable linen shirt.

Saying? "Ask not for whom the three-legged cat meows. It meows for me." Guess whose saying it is.

Meal? Olive Garden's 'Soup, Salad, and Breadsticks' lunch special, with Bellini iced tea.

Drink? Bacardi strawberry daiquiri.

Music? Tim Janis, as a composer, but the rest of my selection is eclectic. The minute I hear or remember a song I like, I download it, so I have this odd playlist. "Bubbly," "Cracklin' Rosie," "Different Drum," "Complicated." All over the place.

Programmes: Really gotten into NCIS and House now that I have cable at these temporary lodgings. Before that, it was Golden Girls, West Wing, and Forensic Files.

Book? To Kill a Mockingbird. It's the macaroni and cheese of the literary world. Comfort food. The best book ever written. You're welcome to disagree as long as you do it silently.

Favourite Films Ever: Varies depending on the mood I'm in, but definitely Troop Beverly Hills and most of the Faerie Tale Theatre episodes, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (some of the songs are boring, but overall I just love it), both National Treasure films, Congo, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, Mulan, The Hobbit, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Stepford Wives (the Nicole Kidman version). I also, again, live for my seven seasons of Golden Girls and West Wing on DVD.