Meet the Daedelean

So who are you, exactly?
I'm Daedelean. I'm from Norway, I'm 29, and I've just finished being a lit student at the University of Oslo. When I'm not ponying, I play videogames and tabletop rpgs, or just sit and read. I've also recently started playing the flute, just for fun.
I've always wanted to be a writer: I wrote a terrible fantasy novel when I was 16, and I've been writing short stories when the inspiration strikes me ever since. Never really had any readers, though, and never got published anywhere. Until I joined Fimfiction, I'd only sporadically been into fanfic, and hadn't written any myself since 2000 or 2001.

What do you like to do?
Apart from ponies and writing and writing about ponies? The usual internet geek fare. I play computer games, something with a solid story for preference, and I've spent far too much time on World of Warcraft, mostly hunting for fabulous outfits rather than fighting to save the world (though I quit WoW last February and might never start again). I play Magic: the Gathering with friends, boardgames with acquaintances at the local game store, and occasionally tabletop RPGs. I read constantly. Mostly pony fics lately, but in general I'll read anything. Having spent the past seven years as a lit student at the university, I got the taste for dense classics more than popular lit, and I'm one of those people who think Shakespeare actually is as good as they say he is.

What's up with the name?
Years and years ago, I had the idea of writing a series of stories that were part sci-fi adventure, part mythological cycle. One of the villains in the story was a mad scientist cyborg who led a cult that worshipped Daedalus, the great inventor and architect of Greek mythology, as a saint of technology. As the followers of Daedalus, they called themselves the Daedeleans.
Meanwhile, in the real world, I wanted a classy, recognizeable name to use as my online handle. I'm a huge mythology nerd, and while I don't have a single inventor's or engineer's bone in my body, I identify with Daedalus's tendency to be much too clever for his own good. Lest we forget, this is the guy who invented the fursuit, and as a result had to build an underground labyrinth to house the offspring that resulted from when the fursuit was used. Later on he tried to repeat the success with a birdsuit, but results were mixed.
Anyway, the Internet being what it is, the name of the inventor of the fursuit was already taken everywhere people have to pick usernames. "Daedelean", however, seems to be a variant that no-one has thought of but me.

Why ponies?
Because it's awesome and funny and well-made and just generally a great show by all the usual metrics you use to judge whether a show is good. Also it has a big mythological dimension to it that just really grabbed me. There's a reason both my main stories are about figures from ancient pony history.

Tell me some of your thoughts on literature.
They are vast and difficult to describe, which is alarming considering that my entire university career has been about practicing how to describe and discuss them. I'm interested in coming up with new approaches to things, and anything that has a smell of formula about it makes me instinctively recoil. Needless to say, TVTropes.org makes me weep. The downside to this approach is that it makes even the smallest of stories take a long time to write, as I don't give myself any easy routes to take, but I like to think the end result is stories that seem genuinely unpredictable and interesting.
I side with George Orwell and always try to keep things clear and easy to understand. I'm not very good at poetic language, and try to keep my prose interesting with such other tools as I have at my disposal.

Aren't you too old for this?
Screw you, bolded voice.

Tell me personal stuff about yourself that you feel awkward talking about.
I'm one of those Asperger's syndrome types, and an introvert. Painfully shy, and find it very difficult to make contact with people. I'm also very insecure and afraid that I'm going to say something offensive and get people mad at me, and even though past experience indicates that this is much less likely to happen than my fears insist, I still can't convince myself I'm more than one second and one badly-worded utterance away from being shunned and cast out.
Say hi or leave a comment on my stories and I'll be muchly smiles.