For one of these LiveJournal memes, amazon_syren has asked me five (rather eclectic!) questions.

1. Black and white photography: favourite styles and why?

I don't know enough about photography -- I just take pictures, see? -- to be able to identify any given style of black and white photography, but I do seem to have some vague preferences:

I like lots of contrast and chiaroscuro.

I like old (mid-20th-century) large format photography. Think Ansel Adams. A lot of railway photography (i.e., steam locomotive porn) belongs under this category, too.

I think sepia is overdone; I'm more fond of cooler tones. I also think that too much graininess is a bug, not a feature.

Thanks to a tip from a friend, I had great success with my last batch of black and white photos using a single colour channel (usually red, yellow or orange), which got me better results that simply grayscaling the full-colour image (which never looks nice to me).

I think infrared photography is interesting.

2. How old were you when you fell in love with snakes? (Quite young, I suspect, but possibly younger than I think . . . )

You suspect correctly. I was at least seven years old, and possibly younger. Here's a photo of me with a rather young boa constrictor, taken in 1979 or possibly 1980, at a reptile exhibit at the Calgary Stampede. There are photos of me with snakes from back then: see My snake-infested childhood.

It happened so long ago that I have trouble keeping the chronology of my memories straight. When, for example, did I encounter the person holding a garter snake on my street? Was that the first snake I ever encountered, much less touched? When did I start reading compulsively about snakes in every library book I could find -- was that before or after I got a snake of my very own? Suffice to say I was very young.

Books inspired dreams about snakes from around the world. A Time-Life book on reptiles, with a photograph of a young girl with a rosy boa, so tame that, according to the caption, it wouldn't even try to bite. Stories about indigo snakes so tame they would sit on your lap and enjoy being handled. Brilliant black-and-white California kingsnakes. Anacondas that, for some reason, grabbed, held and constricted my attention.

A trip to the University of Manitoba where I encountered, for the first time, bullsnakes and black rat snakes.

I hardly ever saw such snakes, not until adulthood, when I would be able to own or encounter every single snake I dreamed of as a child. I can't afford an indigo snake, and anacondas have a nasty reputation, but I've had pleasant encounters with both species. A California kingsnake and a rosy boa were the third and seventh snakes, respectively, that I got when I began accumulating them in 1999.

But in 1980, there were only garter snakes for me.

This was hardly surprising: I lived in Manitoba, the home of the famous Narcisse snake dens (which I visited twice as a child); thousands of snakes were taken from my province every year for the lab supply and pet trades. No surprise, then, that at a Winnipeg pet store -- a place that, among other things, had an electric eel on display -- there was a cage of snakes for sale. They were labelled as "ribbon snakes," but (as I later determined) they were the local species, red-sided garter snakes, and they were four dollars each.

Mine was waiting for me when I got home from school, one sunny, cold day in October.

It was a girl, my mother said; I named it Sally. (In hindsight, given its size and demeanour, it was almost certainly a boy.) Despite a bad diet that nearly killed it over its first winter and a poorly constructed and ventilated cage, I managed to keep it alive for nearly three years. Looking back, I'm not sure how I did that.

A few years later came another pair of garter snakes, which did not survive the year. And then no snakes at all, for a very long time. I didn't give them much thought until 10 years ago, when I desperately looking for something to think about besides my collapsing Ph.D. program. I stopped by an Ottawa pet store to pick up some millet for my girlfriend's cockatiels. There was a bank of snake cages against one wall: corn snakes, kingsnakes, bullsnakes. And a very old passion came rushing back to the fore.

3. Name a food (specific, for preference) that you wish you could eat but can't (and tell me why you can't).

I don't think there is anything that fits these criteria, i.e., there's nothing I can't eat that I wish I could. But there are some near misses.

I'm a lot less lactose tolerant than I used to be, so I can't guzzle dairy products to the same extent I could as a child. Baked cheese seems to be especially problematic. But as long as I control the amount I consume, I'm fine.

For some reason, I haven't been able to eat an A&W Teen Burger without serious and immediate gastrointestinal distress, but this isn't something I pine for.

There are a number of animals I won't eat for conservation reasons, or because I'm too damn fond of the animal that I simply can't bear to eat it. These include all reptiles and amphibians, because I like them too much, and sharks, because they can't be harvested sustainably. But won't eat isn't the same as can't eat, and I certainly don't wish I could.

4. What is (currently) the most frustrating thing to try to believeably work into your novel?

(By the way, I'm working on a novel. amazon_syren knows this, and I've mentioned this to some of my friends and family, but I haven't announced it publicly. More anon.)

The biggest stumbling block I'm facing, as I try to work this novel out in my head before starting to write it, is the ethnicity of the characters.

The novel is set more than a thousand years in the future, on a planet 20 light years away, on a small human colony. I haven't figured out yet who -- i.e., which country -- sends the colony ship. Despite the fact that almost all of my characters are decanted, genetically engineeered frozen embryos, I have to think about who sent them. Because that will tell me something about their culture and, more importantly, what their names are.

I don't want to fall into the very old science-fictional cliché of having everyone with bog-standard Anglo-American (or even western European) names. In many science fiction futures, in fact, the U.S. does not conquer space. joe_haldeman, for example, has set many of his stories in a future history where it was an African- and South American-based Confederación that conquered the stars.

Nor do I want to assume a cultural tabula rasa and have made-up names; in my experience, made-up names end up being real names after all, just washed through the subconscious once or twice so that the author doesn't realize their source. (A lot of Star Trek names, for example, can be found on a map of Europe or in a Parisian phone book. Not very alien at all.)

A third problem: whoever launches the colony ship to this new world is doing so a thousand years from now. (This is for economic reasons: a colony ship is a massive investment; I don't think we can afford one for another millenium.) Think back a thousand years: Old English is not intelligible to the modern English speaker. Similarly, after a thousand years of global civilization, cultural admixture and good old miscegenation, any contemporary concepts of "race" and "ethnicity" will be completely irrelevant. Which has an impact on names: the difference between "William," "Wilhelm" and "Guillaume" will be moot. But what do I come up with instead?

So this is what I've got to figure out before I even name my characters. And it won't even make it into the novel; it's all background.

5. What is your favourite flavour/substance/foodstuff to mix with chocolate?

Milk solids. Dark chocolate -- especially the really good, 70-percent-plus kind of dark chocolate -- is meant to be savoured, not gobbled down, and it's really far too strong to gobble down. And I'm not at all subtle about chocolate: I'm all about consuming it in excessive quantities, and milk chocolate makes that easier. But that's probably not what you meant. Suffice to say, I can consume a Terry's chocolate orange in a sitting if I do not exercise my legendary self-restraint. Let's leave it at that.