I suppose it was in third or fourth grade that I started my journey towards becoming a webster. I remember reading Runaway Ralph, Belling the Cat, and many other books gotten from the Weekly Reader order sheet. Then I got books that my mom had when she was a kid, like Little Women and Hans Brinker. But my favorite was Heidi by Johanna Spry. I loved that book. I particularly liked the fact that Clara did not have to go to school, but had her own personal tutor. To be able to learn and not have to put up with children who tease -- that seemed like heaven to me. So, on the days that I would pretend to be sick (so as to stay home from school), I would watch TV in Momma's bedroom and make up stories. At first they were as simple as pretending to be Clara and doing my own private lessons. Later on, as I felt more and more alienated from my peers, they became more elaborate. I would put on my momma's leopard-print coat and pretend I was some princess, then the Mayor of Debbiton, my own personal world where I was special.
When I went to a school in sixth grade that had its own library, it was inevitable that I became a member of the library club, and remained so for the rest of my public school days. In ninth grade my favorite thing was to have dozens of book checked out at one time, and be reading all of them. Since I had this awful electric blue fake fur coat, I nicknamed myself "The Bookie Monster". I read about Chicken Cordon Bleu, Kiev and Parmesan, Russian Easter eggs, cryptography, Josef Mengele, Sybil and Carrie. When our library got a hardcover copy of Roots (which I had already read the Reader's Digest condensed version of), I was not allowed to check it out. "Only 10th graders allowed to read it," my librarian told me, "I know you could read and understand it, but it's against the rules." So, I just went to Eckerds and bought my own paperback copy! (Way before that, I had been using Daddy's library card to check out books from the adult section, anyway.)
There are all kinds of manias I went through because of books. For example, after I saw "The Man In the Iron Mask" on tv, I became a Louis XIV fanatic, and was convinced I had once been his brother Phillippe in a former life. (I'd already learned about reincarnation and other mystical things by then, too.) In eighth grade "Star Wars" came out, and I went bananas over it. In subsequent years I devoured whatever science fiction and fantasy I could get my hands on. By eleventh grade I'd read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Mary Stuart's Arthurian tales, and had started on the Anne McCaffrey series of books.
Somewhere between Runaway Ralph and The Hobbit I began to write my own stories. I got myself one of those blank journals at Waldenbooks and began to write a science-fiction story. I even did primitive illustrations of the story with the chalk pastels I had gotten at band camp in Monroe the previous summer. I'd seen the movie "FutureWorld" sometime before, and when I looked up the name Delos I found out it was, in fact, an island in the Cyclades, the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, whose mother was Leto and father was Zeus. So I concocted this story about a world called Solarium, where persons lived before they could be reincarnated on Earth. I invented cities on the world, Honniki and Monikka being two, but the most important one was, of course, Delos. The two main characters were a pair of twins, Apollo and Artemis. The special thing about these twins was that they originally identical, except that one had been transformed, somehow, from a female to a male. And that they were meant from birth to be lovers, as some kind of preparation for their future lives on Earth.
What this story really was was a vehicle for me to express my fantasies about Mike, the guy I'd been enamored of since eighth grade. And a few of the bassoon instructor I'd had at band camp. Although they were very sensual, they were not at all graphic, since of course I had no frame of reference. A few years later, thoroughly absorbed by Middle-Earth, I wrote of an Elvish girl, Lerin, who'd been waiting for her beloved Olorin to return to Valinor. She'd been a child and his student when he'd been called upon to go to Middle-Earth, to become known as Gandalf. New characters, same story -- soulmates finally reunited, married and making love in all sorts of romantic places.
In the summer of 1990, I'd fallen in love with a magazine called Epic Illustrated (something along the lines of Heavy Metal), so I got the idea to write an illustrated story of my own. I didn't go far with it, but a few years later I fleshed out the idea and began to write a story I called 2135. It retained some elements of Tolkien in it, but was set in the future and had magical elements was well. It also served as a way to express my newest obsession, my love of the rock band Queen.
I finished the first draft in 1983, and with naive enthusiasm planned the trip I would take to London with my advance. After only a few rejections, I gave up submitting it, but I never have stopped working on it. As my taste in fiction and my life has changed, so has The Book. My life has changed so drastically in the fifteen years since I first started writing it that I am tempted to revise it yet again, make it revelant to my life... but then again, I'm not.
