(This has been adjusted from my original composition on the Worldbuilding site.)

Hybrid armchair copyeditor-storyteller-roleplayer-mythologist escapist, with gradually subdued nitpicking habits but reasonable competence in only one language, though I have dabbled in about a dozen others.

Started reading fantasy fiction in 1978, alongside various mythology & folklore collections. These days I read with no genre barrier to speak of, but even more slowly since The Web became one of my prominent timesinks.

Started playing RPGs in the mid-'80s (AD&D, Star Frontiers, GURPS) and branched out further in the early '90s (Warhammer, World of Darkness, Ars Magica).

I include roleplayer under the 'armchair' designation because I have never manged to sustain long campaigns of any kind during my particular windows of time with my circles of friends (and tournament play has never appealed to me on any level). I have probably spent less than 1% of {my time engaged with roleplaying game materials} actually interacting with other humans.

'Bookworm' is a fair designation, but my reading speed is rather sub-par (although my typing and cold-reading aloud are excellent). My grade school years included the California Achievement Test at regular intervals, and my only plunge below the top decile was consistently Reading Comprehension. Nevertheless, my so-far-never-ending thirst for text has slowly given me a reasonably intuitive grounding in the humanities (if nothing else), so I relish the chance to discuss usage even though I remain hopeless as to the meta-level terminology of explaining a great many things linguistically.

Until I have undergone some remedial research, I will refrain from answering many "right/wrong way to ______" questions, because although I can almost always discern the correct from the incorrect, I cannot say precisely why regarding anything more complex than, say, the difference between nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. My vocabulary is bankrupt when it comes to technical distinctions of pronouns, tenses and such. (Case in point: until just now I had completely forgotten that "determiner" is a word class. I have no trouble following all the ordinary rules which pertain to determiners - I know determiners without knowing that they are called determiners - but if someone had asked me "what kind of word is 'every'?" I would have said "dunno, but it's not a noun or verb or adjective or adverb!", and if I'd been asked "What's a determiner?" I would have been stumped beyond lamely supposing "a thing that determines?"