I Blame It on Gran

I have always enjoyed reading and unabashedly blame that on my gran, a retired school teacher, who signed me up for a library card at the Carnegie Library (a lot of them were named Carnegie in those days). It was love at first sight for me as an impressionable five year old. The touch and feel of the books, their bindings, the feel of the paper, the smell of the older volumes, all added to the experience. Admittedly at five years old, the pictures in the books were more interesting at first.

When Gran taught me to read and write before I was enrolled in kindergarten, I discovered that stories were more than colored pictures on the page. They could sweep their readers away to places they could barely imagine before picking up a bound edition, and I couldn't wait to be swept away.

Reading took over my life at a young age as I went from Dr. Seuss and fairy tales to Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. To this day, I enjoy time travel stories.

Moving on to mysteries, I went sleuthing with Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden, young mystery-solving teens.

As I grew older and became bored with teen crime solvers, I picked up my first science fiction novels by reading Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke were next. A fan of the aforementioned science fiction novels, I equally absorbed Dark Shadows, The Outer Limits and Star Trek on television like a black hole singularity.

As a senior in high school, I needed an extra English credit and elected to take a science fiction writing class, never realizing that I would actually enjoy writing stories for the class. I had dabbled in poetry off and on before that but was surprised that I could actually write stories.

I drifted for a while into historical fiction then moved back to science and fantasy fiction. I devoured Terry Brooks' original Shannara trilogy and subsequent novels except for the Landover novels which were well-written but did not draw me in as a reader. Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels were next, and I was drawn into the world of telepathetic dragons and fire lizards. I still have all the Pern novels and occasionally re-read them. After reading Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragonlance Chronicles, I enjoyed other worlds that they have created as well.

In college, I enrolled in literature and writing classes though I have to admit that I was utterly burned out on Sylvia Plath and Walt Whitman by the end of that time thanks to graduate student instructors who spent nearly the entire semester on having their students analyze and write papers on works by Plath and Whitman to use in their theses. But I digress.

I didn't read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings series until I was in my twenties. Though I thought the story was brilliant, the description of every rock and blade of grass along the way bored me to tears.

I discovered fan fiction about eleven years ago and began exploring other worlds writing fics for various fandoms. To date, my favorite mythological creature is the dragon. I have written a few stories about them including a fic in the Dragonriders of Pern universe though haven't posted it on Fanfiction.net due to Anne McCaffrey's restrictions.

The vampire genre has been another inspiration of mine, and I have written fics about more than one vampire mythology though only one of those mythologies is published on Fanfiction.net.

After watching the first episode of True Blood, I purchased Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris. I quickly bought the rest of the Southern Vampire Mysteries and the books with her SVM short stories, as well, and read them in a week. Although I like the HBO series, I enjoy the books so much more, and having watched True Blood, I can now visualize Harris' characters and can even hear the actors saying the lines if I reread any of the books.

If you haven't guessed by now, my favorite character from the Southern Vampire Mysteries is Eric Northman. There is just something about a tall, blonde, thousand year old Viking that latches onto a viewer or reader and doesn't let go. It doesn't hurt that Alexander Skarsgård, the actor who portrays Eric Northman, is extremely easy on the eyes.

My fan fiction activities at present are focused on writing stories for the Southern Vampire Mysteries created by Charlaine Harris. I have also started a True Blood-based story called Trust Me which is a re-telling of the end of season two of the series and which moves on to my vision of season three. My SVM fan fiction stories are posted on Fanfiction.net.

I am currently writing a stand-alone mystery and a fantasy series which I hope to have published when completed. I am also a moderator on HBO's True Blood Wiki. [Visit my profile].