Writing (Part One)

I recently got into a conversation about how and why I write. Though I've told the story a lot, I've never really written it down. Weird, huh? so I thought, now's the time to talk about it.

My parents were both teachers, and both BIG BIG BIG readers, so our house has always been full of books. I mean thousands. Even today, we have multiple bookcases in every room of the house, there are boxes of books stored out in the root cellar, boxes of books in the barn, anyplace we can store them. My mom, being an English teacher, loved the classics: Dickens, Trollope, Milton, Balzac; you know, the good stuff, the long hair stuff. My dad, God rest his soul, loved science fiction and thrillers: Doc Savage, Ellery Queen, Michael Crichton, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, the lot.

I started reading when I was four. The first book I ever read (and still qualifies as my favorite book of all time) was Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I actually came at things backwards. Most people start with crap, and move up to the classics. I started out with the classics, and ended up in speculative fiction. Like I said, I read Alice when I was four, Jane Eyre when I was eight, Shakespeare over the course of ages six to ten, etc. It wasn't until I was about ten that I got hooked on the James Blish novelizations of Star Trek, and from there moved into Dad's realm of reading. I got hooked, particularly when a friend of mine in junior high turned me onto Tolkien and fantasy in general.

OK, that's not strictly true: I had always had a bit of a fetish for horror. I read Dracula when I was seven, and got really hooked on that. But it was a weird thing for me. I read horror, but not the gore and Stephen King popular horror. I was reading Guy de Maupassant's short stories, H.P. Lovecraft, John Polidori, Turn of the Screw, rather than the more modern, gory stuff.

When I was eight years old, our TV died. My father refused to have it fixed. According to him, TV was rotting our brains, and we could do better things with our time than sitting in front of the idiot box. I think we went three years without a TV, and at first, it was rough. Bear in mind, we lived WAY out in the country; it's not like we could go hang out in the mall. Our nearest neighbors were a mile away, and most of the people on our road didn't have children our age. And we were weird children (teacher's brats, remember), so the kids that did live in biking range didn't want to play with us.

All we had were each other -- I have three sisters -- and a big old farm. So we did a lot of exploring of the farm, climbing trees, wandering the woods, catching snakes and frogs and fireflies, that sort of country thing, and it was good. My mother STILL doesn't know that my oldest sister (ten years old, and always absolutely fearless) -- at the time, I was eight, Margaret was seven, and Sarah was FIVE -- taught us all how to free climb on the forty five foot cliff face on top of one of our hills. I sometimes wonder how we survived our childhood.

We also became pretty sharp little card players (ask me one time how a ten year old and an eight year old KICKED ASS at cards on a couple of grownups at a family reunion; it was a hoot). I learned to play checkers, chess, backgammon. I had always known how to sew, but I started making most of my own clothes. My sister started painting and drawing. We discovered things about ourselves that we never knew existed. It was an amazing time.

And I did a LOT of reading, more than I had ever done in my life. I read every book we had in the house (including three entire sets of encyclopedias). And then, when they were done, I re-read them again. There's only so many times you can re-read books before you start craving something new. The nearest library was a forty minute drive away, so that was not going to be happening a lot, and, as some of you know, teachers don't make squat for money, so buying enough to feed my addiction was also not going to happen.

So where does the writing come in? OK, my sister Lillian and I shared a bedroom, and she had a radio that was never ever turned off. One summer day, I was in the bedroom, looking through the bookshelf for something to read when this one song came on. "Devil Woman" was the song, by Cliff Richards. Remember when I said I had always had a horror fetish? Well, I fricking HATED THIS SONG. It had all the good horror tropes that I loved, but I didn't understand the song, the sexual innuendo -- come on, I was like eight or nine, what the hell did I know? -- so I found the song really disappointing. It didn't pay off the way I wanted it to, damn it!

So, I had an epiphany! I would rewrite the song as a story, and "fix" the ending. I spent the whole day lying on my belly in my bedroom floor, rewriting that song as a story. I don't recall how I ended the story, or what has happened to it in the intervening years, but an obsession had started. don't have anything to read? Just write something. Writing was like reading, only BETTER! I wrote stories, I wrote plays that my sisters and I would put on for Mom and Dad, I wrote fan fiction, I wrote everything I could think of.