My parents proudly proclaim to all interested ears that I read my first book, Hop on Pop, at age four, and was reading at a fifth-grade level by the time I was seven. What’s that joke about people who were smart kids turning out burned out and exhausted by adulthood?
Reading has been there for me my entire life (except the first three years, I guess). My third-grade teacher, to whom I plan to dedicate my first novel, would read to my class after first recess, usually a chapter at a time from a long novel for our age group. He’d explain things we didn’t understand and, of course, do voices for the characters. He’s the one who introduced me to the fantasy genre with Cornelia Funke’s Dragon Rider. Thanks, Mr. Griggs.
My first real taste of reading that led to my current addiction came to me at age thirteen, when a boyfriend lent me his entire set of The Inheritance Cycle. He did not get them back. Sorry, not sorry. From there it was on to The Kingkiller Chronicle. Those two series are what I think we all understand as the “foundational books”, the ones you read just at the right time during adolescence that they shaped the way you think about stories and characters. Saige, Olivia (our resident artiste) and I had the great pleasure of meeting Christopher Paolini at Dragonsteel Nexus in 2023, during which my teenage self screamed from deep inside me as the man himself signed my beaten-to-shit, well-loved, annotated hardcover of Eldest. I was also introduced to Stephen King around this age by my dad, the tree from which I did not fall far from at all.
“Author” was one of my “what I want to be when I grow up” things, usually mentioned after “teacher” and “pop star”. Throughout my school years, I experimented for fun with little snippets of stories, usually stolen from something I’d watched or read. In middle school, my friend Clara and I used to trade stories back and forth; by that age, I was all about shock value and being different (who wasn’t?) so my stories were often gorefests, meant to be passed around a table and laughed over.
It wasn’t until I read the aspiring writer’s Bible, On Writing, at age twenty-four that I began to think about writing in a serious way. I could always feel stories inside me, brewing without my consent and sitting stagnant for years while I tried college twice and failed, suffered through a toxic relationship, and worked jobs that treated my body like a hackey-sack. But King’s advice and anecdotes inspired me, as was his intention, and I began to free write, a technique taught in high school.
I would set a timer for ten minutes every morning, then sit at my desk and write on lined paper anything that came to my mind. It was during one of these sessions that I wrote the prologue to my first novel, The Silverwing.
Now, two years later, The Silverwing is complete and being sent off in query letters to literary agents, and I have started four other novels and completed two short stories, which are routinely rejected by every horror literary magazine I’ve sent them to.
It’s fine. Builds character.
I’m incredibly excited to share my journey with this impossible dream with not only you, reader, but my dear friend Saige, who approached me with the idea of co-writing a blog, to which I gave an instant “HELL YEAH!”
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