I write stuff.

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I finished reading The Lord of the Rings when I was eleven years old, and it warped me for life. (In a GOOD way, IMHO!)

 

I immediately began writing crappy Tolkien Mary Sue, because I wanted to read more books like that and there just weren’t any, in those days.

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I wrote dozens and dozens of Crappy Tolkien Mary Sues all throughout high school. This might have worked out better for me if I hadn't written them during math class. Then one day in the late 1970s a for-real Tolkien knockoff was actually published (the first in what was to become a deluge of them) and I said “Oh, my god, what a horrible thing to do!” Throwing all of my CTMSs into a heap, I used them as kindling to burn that book, vowing from then on to write only original stuff.

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I don’t write Tolkien knockoffs anymore, but I still write the kind of thing I wish I could find more of in book stores. That kind of thing tends to have fantastical elements, but it all takes place in a real and modern setting.

 

There are faeries in my stories, but you had better not dare call them that to their faces. There are ghosts, but they are not evil - no more so than any of the humans you know, anyway. Like Nell’s T-shirt says: Ghosts are People, Too!

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I guess mainly what I strive to write is soul-food for adults who refuse to stop believing that even grownups can encounter magic right here, right now, around any corner of this everyday, modern world. 

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Do you believe?