Liza who?

By now you might be wondering who this Liza-person is, and what exactly it means to be an “Intelligent Lizard”.

I am Liza, most easily recognized from my freckles, glasses, and penchant for fun hairclips.  Or hair sticks.  Or any other hair thing that catches my fancy.  I write silly stories, and occasionally serious ones, and almost always fantastical* ones.  I don’t usually include footnotes in my stories.  I also get paid to break software**.  By “break” I mean do perfectly reasonable things that cause the software to behave incorrectly, before the customer does.  (One of the coolest jobs around, by the way.)  I also knit, sew, hike, watch a lot of movies, read a lot of books, surf the internet, and try to learn as much as possible about life from as many directions as I can manage.  I inadvertently start new projects, and then forget to finish them.  (I bought the coolest paintbrush ever, and I don’t even paint.  Well, I didn’t, until I got this brush….)

Have I read any of your stories?

Unless you know me personally (and perhaps not even then), there is a very low chance that you have read any of my stories.  I haven’t published any, and I haven’t posted any on the internet in years, and not anywhere anyone is likely to find them.  (I’ve been reveling in obscurity.)  You may notice my Haiku Corner, which includes some haiku that I’ve written***, and some day I may see fit to post a story or two here.

How can I find you?

The things I post here on intelligentlizard.com are mirrored to http://lizawrites.livejournal.com.  I’m also on facebook, if you already know me, and I’m on twitter as purplelizard.  (I recently joined tumblr, too, but I haven’t decided if I’m going to maintain it.  http://purplelizard.tumblr.com)

Why “intelligent lizard”?

Well, it’s meant to be indirectly self-deprecating.  One of the earliest characters my friends and I invented was The Great and Wise Lizabeth, who was a freckled lizard who wore glasses and hairclips and sat atop a Great Hill, sometimes in Timbuktu, other times in Tibet, and sometimes she was in high school in New York.  She believed herself to be a very intelligent lizard, but usually the advice she gave people was really bad.  And really funny.

What is a renaissance lizard, again?

Um.  That’s a phrase I made up.  I’ve discovered that I get inordinately bored by doing just one (or two, or five) thing(s) every day.  I need variety.  Like the Renaissance Men of old†, I want to learn about many different things, and become at least passably skilled at a bunch of them.  My primary foci are QA and writing, but I majored in Computer Science and History, wish I’d majored in Linguistics (too, not instead), and have been trying to catch up on science by listening to Astrophysics and Evolutionary college courses as podcasts.  I try to keep up on current events (but they pass me by too quickly, sometimes), but I prefer the long view of history.  Everything is connected to everything, and everything reveals something about life, so studying anything is a good way to study life.  Except that I want to study everything. o_O.

To make time for Everything, I’ve been trying to quit eating and sleeping, as they’re a waste of time, but I find the withdrawal symptoms too unpleasant to manage for long. *sigh*

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* By fantastical, I mean in some way not based on reality.  Usually there are elements of sci fi or fantasy in my stories, occasionally both, and when neither are present, then I’m usually abstract.  I’ve tried writing realistic fiction, and just can’t figure out how.  The fantastical is the lens through which I draw attention to an interesting aspect of reality.

** Specific software, written by my company, not just any software.  I get annoyed by bugs in other people’s software.

*** Unfortunately wordpress has issues putting newlines in the appropriate spots.  You’ll just have to trust that I’ve broken the lines at 5-7-5 syllables.

† I restrained myself from saying “Renaissance Men of the Renaissance”, because that would be redundundant.  Aren’t you glad?