I've been tagged!

a. Link to the person who tagged you, which in my case is Emma Ray Garrett.

b. Post the rules on your blog.

c. Write six random things about yourself.

1. I write and draw with my left hand. Everything else, I do right-handed. Except for sports, which I can't do with either hand.
2. I'm not dyslexic, but I have great problems with left/right and east/west, and I also sometimes mix up words when I speak. Coping mechanisms have included everything from checking the L and R on the soles of my ballet slippers when I was four, to feeling for the callus on my left middle finger where I hold a pen, making an L sign with the finger and thumb of my left hand, and visualising a map of the UK, where I live in East Anglia at one side of the country, so I know which way is east and which is west.
3. I'm really cranky today because I have monster toothache, coupled with either a cold or hayfever. I got woken up at five, then six, by the Demon Puppy barking at someone walking past the house, then at seven by my neighbour's car alarm, which has been going off sporadically for two days (but never, of course, when they're at home).
4. I've just finished a book I started writing in 2005. I intended it as a sequel to Almost Human, but whenever I tried to get stuck into it, something else--another book under contract, a holiday, a family crisis, whatever--kept getting in the way.
5. I was born on St Patrick's Day. Because of this--and the useful fact of having an Irish great-grandfather--I never have to buy a drink on my birthday. Ever. So long as I'm drinking Guinness.
6. Tomorrow I'm going away for a week with my family, because it's my mum's birthday on Sunday--a Significant Birthday--and she challenged my dad to surprise her. My dad came up with a few ideas, I told him why they wouldn't work, and we came up with a plan between us. Since Mum's requirements were for four adults and a dog, but no self-catering, it wasn't easy. But it should be fun. If my tooth stops hurting.

d. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
Okay, Emma Ray got a load of the ones I'd tag, and I don't read many blogs of people I know well enough to tag! So... I'm breaking the rules, and just tagging Stacia D Kelly, who is always so fulsome in her praise, and Julie Cohen, who just sold a mad space-romp to Samhain who I decided not to tag since she's recently bereaved and I didn't want to bother her. So...that's just one person, then. Well, I'm a born rule-breaker, baby.

e. Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment at their blog.

f. Let your tagger know when your entry is up.

Emma Ray? I posted!