Why Write

Why do I write? I write because I love to read and there are some books that I want to read that won’t exist unless I write them.

Mostly, I stick to my favorite genres – those fantastical, out-of-this-world, big scary or big science genres I love so much – fantasy, science fiction, horror, paranormal romance. I do so love writing in those genres. Part of it is because, in those genres, the worlds can be what I want – places where the only laws that matter are the ones I’ve made up myself, so long as I can make a logical(ish) enough case for them in the writing.

I do dip a toe into nonfiction sometimes, usually about my parents or my children or my chronic illnesses. But I’m finding myself searching for a book that, so far, doesn’t exist. By the time I figure out the words, it may exist by someone far more qualified than myself but I may give the writing of it a go, even if just for myself. It’s the sort of something I’ve been mulling off and on for very nearly twenty years.

My grandmother would like me to write children’s books (I think she’d find that far more palatable than paranormal romance or (gasp of distaste) horror) but that’s really not my cuppa – I, of course, told my children stories but they didn’t much care one way or another and neither have any recollection of them now, as a teenager and an adult so I don’t much figure they were any good.

I’ll never step away from fiction – its rooted too deeply in my existence and I have stories I want to tell that don’t exist yet so it’s my job to write them. Like my hedgewitch granny book(s?) and my Hell’s Redemption story that’s been percolating for about five years and my bog witch story that keeps trying to find form. My problem isn’t finding my words or finding my stories but finding my audience. But, I’ll keep plugging along and reaching out and doing my best to draw you all in and hope you want to hear my stories.

Mistakes & Regrets

I’ve been writing pretty much since I could put words together – my first poem was dictated to my grandmother when I was about 3.5, just after I got my first cat. I wrote my first book in 7th grade so that would be 13 or so. I still have that one – it’s a fantasy and pretty terrible (though good for my age I was told). I wrote the first half of my second book directly after and this is one of my biggest mistakes and regrets in all my years of writing – I literally threw it away.

I know it took place in the Maldives because I had this oversized illustrated atlas and it was the most foreign, most interesting place in it (this was before I had access to the Internet). I know it was a horror story that contained a series of murders. I know I threw it away because it creeped me out. Me. The girl who spent lunch periods reading Silence of the Lambs (and that one got a phone call to my mother). The girl who bought an extra pregnant shark in biology class earlier that same year to do a proper autopsy style dissection on the table in my grandfather’s funeral home.

I’ve spent years looking for a book that replicated that feeling – being utterly creeped out, the kind of creeped out that crawls in to the blood and festers. Years. And I had it right in front of me, from my own mind and I have very little idea of what it was that got under my skin so badly that I had to throw it away.

I know there was a girl who found the body of her best friend, partly decomposed and explained in as much detail as a child with no access to the sort of research that would make that realistic could do. I have no other recollection of the story. What I wouldn’t give to remember that story – specifically what it was that made it different from all the rest of my stories, of the many many horror novels I read in that year, the following years, that never got to me so badly that I threw it out. Maybe someday I’ll remember but until I do, my biggest regret in my writing life will be throwing that away.