MORE ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS FROM HANNAH

Here are more answers to questions posed by Hannah McCrane

 

You have 60 seconds to go back and tell your past self (at any age) anything. What do you say?

I’d tell my teenage self, “Believe in yourself as much as the yay-sayers in your life believe in you. Some of your naysayers are afraid for you and don’t expect you to succeed so they want you to choose something safer as a career; the others are  jealous and don’t want you to succeed because they don’t think anyone should succeed any better than they have, or will.”

 

Would you rather meet Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck?

 

Neither!  I’m a  former Warner Bros. employee (from 1992-2004!) (OK, I temped at Disney TV, too, for a couple of weeks and at Disney Studios for a few days–that was my unhappiest entertainment experience, hands down.) so I’ll pass on Mickey and Donald entirely.  I’d like to meet Yosemite Sam or Marvin the Martian, though.  (I’ve met the voice actors for a lot of WB cartoons, though, and that’s pretty close to the real thing!)

 

Out of the 7 dwarves, which one do you think you’re most like?

 

Bashful.  But I wasn’t born bashful; I was made bashful by ham-handed adult “correctors” who thought I was over the top and tried to “tame/moderate” me. What it did was cripple me for too many years! It still affects me to this day.

 

If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you’d be?

 

When I wasn’t a writer full time (before January 2, 2007), I was an executive secretary or administrative assistant at Warner Bros. If I weren’t a writer now, I’d be retired completely.

 

If you could have any stuffed animal or plush right now, what would it be? I have an entire Critter Corral (living room) filled with stuffed animals.  I’d like to find an adorable bat to hang from the ceiling or an adorable alpaca two feet tall as a long-necked counterpart to my giraffe. There’s one at Albertson’s I’m eying, in fact. (An alpaca.)

 

 

How are you today?  At noon today, not so good.  (Got a pain in my brain and it scared me for a minute, ’til I checked to be sure I wasn’t having a stroke.) Now, I’m fine again.  (Probably residual concussion stuff. It can take weeks to get back up to par.)

 

What’s the one extinct animal that you’d most like to meet?  A woolly mammoth, I guess…

 

Do you believe in the Lock Ness Monster?  I believe in many creatures that indigenous peoples have reported on for hundreds of years.  I think they’ve lived in nature successfully and have seen creatures we haven’t.

 

I think Sasquatch (Bigfoot) is real and I think something prehistoric may live in Loch Ness, but it isn’t a monster.  It’s most likely an aquatic seagoing creature that has managed to either reproduce successfully OR stay alive from the primordial past. (Like Ogopogo in Okanogan Lake in British Columbia, Canada. They might be the same type of creature, since the sightings describe a similar-looking beast.)

 

What’s one vacation that you’d love to take, but haven’t yet? New Zealand, Africa, and Ireland, in that order.