Meet Kylyssa Shay - Answering Availiasvision's Challenge

HubPages author, Jennifer Arnett, challenged writers to interview themselves. I decided to follow her instructions and gave it a shot. The questions I've answered below came from her challenge. The answers came from my own weird little brain and anything that you don't like on this page comes only from me.

If you'd like to learn more about me, Kylyssa Shay, you may wish to read on.

It's very hard to choose my favorite word because I love so very many words. I guess I'd have to say my favorite word is empathy. I find it pleasing and interesting to the ear and it embodies a concept I try to base my life on.

At the heart of the word is love for other feeling beings, seeing others, not as strangers, but as ourselves in different circumstances. I believe all people are family, even on a deeper level than biology alone can account for. We are such tiny beacons of self-awareness, bits of the cosmos wakening to life and awareness, the universe struggling to understand itself. The sound of the word empathy reminds the ear of words like symphony, unity, and embrace and sounds like gentle murmuring.

I'm not terribly fond of pulchritude, but that's just because pulchritude sounds like a gagging noise or a description of some kind of horrible stench completely at odds with its meaning of loveliness. Don't believe me? Forget the definition of pulchritude for a moment and read the following sentence aloud:

"The pulchritude around me filled all of my senses until I thought I'd choke on it like a solid thing."

Now doesn't that sound like a description of something really gross? Doesn't pulchritude go well with and sound natural with the word choke?

Try this sentence:

"The elf queen's hair floated about her perfect features like a glistening, liquid cloud and I sighed in awe of her dainty, feminine pulchritude."

That sounds like someone under an elven glamour of infatuation praising the queen's petite royal flatulence, doesn't it? Pulchritude sounds gassy to me.

SCIENCE!

I find scientific discoveries and innovations incredibly spiritually and creatively exciting. They turn my mind to avenues I'd never known existed before and open up possibilities I can't help but plunge down through mental fantasies. The more information I soak up, the more avenues, boulevards, roads, deer trails, and wormholes open up.

One day while researching how to make Bucky Balls and carbon nano-tubes at home so I could make a beautiful high-efficiency solar cell and write a craft tutorial about it I found myself deep in the physics of the universe.

As the history of carbon wound its way from the depths of supernova fusion back to the uniformity of elemental hydrogen I found myself awestruck and staring. I was thinking in stellar nurseries bright enough to blind the mind's eye. I saw in great stretches of extremely organized nothing forming the fabric of the universe.

As I read and read and read, springing from one sparkling website to the next I managed to put some of it into something like spoken words, piecing concepts together. I found myself wondering whether space was just time getting bigger as it aged making distance truly equivalent to the fabric of time? Being fabric, can it be folded? But being made up of only one infinitesimally tiny pinch of nothing going so fast it can be everywhere at once, isn't distance only a two dimensional illusion anyway? And round and round it went until the outline and first two chapters of something entirely unlike the project I'd started lay open on my screen.

All that from came from a tiny bit of science research I started while writing a craft tutorial. I should have the novel it spawned up on Amazon some time next year.

Fear that comes from ignorance is my biggest turn off in every aspect of my life.

When I was a child living on a pig farm in rural Michigan, I learned early on that a frightened animal is a very dangerous, possibly even deadly animal. As I scooped up piglets in a milk crate for their iron supplement treatment, leaping into the back of a battered tan van pursued by angry, terrified sows, I realized that most fear is completely unnecessary. Animals fear because they are ignorant. I really wished I could explain it to them at the time because I didn't enjoy my completely rational fear of their sharp, saliva-foamed tusks and crushing teeth.

Within a few years of that, I came to realize that most horrible things people do to each other come from similarly irrational fears. Clearly, humans react much like other animals when they are afraid. Luckily, humans can see through their ignorance sometimes, but there are still those sharp tusks and crushing teeth to be concerned about when they can't.

I love the sounds water makes, from steaming water plashing into a cast iron tub to waves breaking on the ocean shore. I enjoy the sound of raindrops large and small, on a tin roof, on wide glossy leaves, on dusty clay tiles, on my umbrella, or even on my skin in a stinging downpour. I find the tinkling of my home aquarium delightful and the gurgle of water coursing through pipes homey.

I hate the sounds of coughing and wheezing. They are too deeply entwined with my recollections of listening to the labored breathing of far too many of my loved ones as they lay ill or dying, the sound of farm animals and pets taking their last breaths, and my own struggles to breathe through many bouts of pneumonia.

Nothing makes me suddenly start worrying about a person like a bit of wheezing does.

"Balls!" is my favorite curse word. I think it's because it's so versatile and can express a gamut of feelings from utter disgust, to mild disappointment, to surprise, or even to sympathy regarding the unfairness of a situation or event.

I would love to create props for science fiction and fantasy movies and television shows. I sometimes watch shows like Stargate and Game of Thrones with the sound off just to take in the gorgeous pieces of art their props departments have created. I love to sculpt, carve, and paint unusual things so it would provide me with an outlet where my artwork could be appreciated and put to tangible use.

I wouldn't want any job in which I'm required to take advantage of other people or hurt other people. I also know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I do not want a job in sales. I've had a few because I had no other choice, not retail sales, mind you but in-your-face huckstering. It was more exhausting than any of the jobs I've had that involved hard physical labor. I'd rather haul wood all day nursing a smashed thumb while my toes were going numb from the cold than try to push people into buying things or ideas they don't want or need. I've done both and I assure you that the former is much more pleasant than the latter.

"Oh, balls! I didn't tell any of those jerks down there to act like that!"

In the film version of your autobiography, who would you like to play yourself?

The very thought is horrifying. How about the Invisible Woman?

I don't know, if I had to choose someone, maybe Robert Carlyle in a fat suit with boobs on it? I know he's a man, but I think he has the right range for it. He's brilliant with emotionally unstable characters going through a wide variety of experiences. Any actress would be too pretty for the role without hours of makeup, anyway.

What quality or talent do you wish you could cultivate?

I wish I could develop my charisma to the point that I could get people to listen to me when I'm saying something that agrees with their own sense of logic. I realize that's pretty low to set the bar but it's far enough beyond my reach for it to be a vast improvement.

Who is your favorite fictional character ever?

I am deeply torn between The Doctor from Dr. Who and Jonathan Thomas Meriweather from Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger series.

If you could have the career of any author, who would it be?

I'd love to have the career of Kylyssa Shay. My writing is my voice. There's no point in having a writing career if it isn't my own.

What inspires you?

See my flowery monologue on science up above.

When did you first realize you were a writer?

I didn't. I learned to write as a toddler, not just because I was taught, but because I wanted to share my thoughts with other people. It seemed the easiest, clearest, most efficient method of communicating to other people without interruption.

I realized I probably wasn't actually a writer as other people consider it around the time I was twelve.

Seriously, it never occurred to me that people learned to write down words for any other reason until then. I thought everyone lucky enough to be able to write coherently was a writer.