I’ve been writing since I was 9 years old, maybe before then even. My mother always maintained to the very end of her life that I was reading long before 1st grade. I probably started reading at around age 3 or 4. I can remember picking out words I recognized from the age of three in Ferdinand the Bull when my babysitter was reading it to me. In 1st grade I can remember getting the entire reading game within 6 weeks of starting 1st grade, so I read ahead to the stories at the back of the book. I quickly mastered the past tense narrative. First grade phonics helped this ability immeasurably. I was fascinated by fairy tales. I was fascinated by their magic. I besides liked stories which featured an active heroine. I got into a bit of a pickle in the school library when I tried to check out from the school library books above the primary (grades 1st through 3rd) school shelf. I knew that I could read these books, why didn’t the librarian? I went home and told my mother, herself a former primary school teacher. She met with the principal and the librarian, who had one question, “But what about the hard words?” “If my daughter thinks she can read a book, she probably can. We’ll look up the hard words.” I got the meaning of many of those “hard” words from context.
From about 1st grade on, in the printing part of the class, my teacher had us print out sentences, andmine were always fanciful ones I got from all the fairy tales I’d read. In the summer between 2nd and 3rd grade, we moved to a suburb, and had a bookmobile coming to down the street from our house. Here no disapproving librarian passed judgment on my choice of reading material. I discovered the Andrew Lang Fairy Books. I read them all, or should I say, I devoured them? I could read a book per day, and I began to conceive of my own fairy tale, which was a mashup of all the fairy tales I had read up to the age of 9. I named my heroine after the little girl Anne next door, since her mother often tasked me with entertaining her of a summer’s day. What little girl doesn’t want a fairy tale princess named after her? It would take over 50 years, but I finally had the final version submitted to my publisher in 2017. In that time, fantasy had come of age as a genre, and I was off and running.
The 1st book I had published for an ebook house was what’s now known as “an urban fantasy” about the Celtic God of Love Aongus MacOgg, where under a geas (obligation) from the Morrighan, he is plopped down in the middle of present-day San Francisco where he must become loved by a woman from this time. You’ll know by this that in those 50 years, I had also devoured numerous books on mythology. Numerous stories had been written about the Greco-Roman deities coming to the present day, but how many Celtic deities had? It was a wide-open field, and I was plowing it for all I was worth. I discovered NaNoWriMo, and in the 10 or so years since then have written numerous 1st rough drafts, which I am now working on.
I still read. I frankly don’t see how a person can write, call hirself a writer, and not read. A person on Facebook asked, “If I want to write, does that mean that I must also read?” I don’t know how he can escape without reading a single book and still want to call himself a writer. How can he know what’s out there if he doesn’t read? Writing is a lot like alchemy, you turn base metal in the shape of a rough idea into gold by refining it until it shines. My latest effort that is seeing publication is titled Love on the Other Side of the Sun II: Book of Invasions. It follows after Love on the Other Side of the Sun I with our three couples forcibly separated, first by a bunch of radical Muslims, and then by some very greedy Mormons. Will they ever be able to get back together? Will their daughter be returned to the loving arms of her family before she is forced to marry one of the Elders? Find out at CrimsonFrostBooks.com. Or at Amazon.com.
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