When I was
five or six, my mother began to worry that my older brother's "reading is
lame" stance would have a negative affect on my reading enthusiasm. To
counter my brother's influence, she
offered to pay me a dollar for every book I read. A dollar is a lot of money. So when she took me to the
library that afternoon, I loaded up on books.
The first
series I saw was The Boxcar Children.
It was sitting on a display shelf in a cool box that looked like a train. A
beautiful display that I promptly destroyed by shoving the first ten books into
my library bag and checking out. At home I dived into reading. If I read enough
books, I'd be rich! Maybe even more rich than my brother!
I read
every book our little library had to offer in the series, and moved on to the
next display, The Babysitters Club:
Little Sisters Club. Then I read Sweet Valley Twins, the Full House books, and every other book I
could get my hands on that looked relatively new.
I get obsessive when I find a writer I
like. I have to read every book by that
author. With some authors, that's not a huge deal. With Francine Pascal it breaks
the bank. By now my mom owed me over a hundred dollars. I never saw a penny of
the money after I hit the twenty dollar mark.
When I
finished the Sweet Valley Twins
series (I'm sure I only read a fraction of them, but they were all I could
find. Thank goodness amazon.com
had not yet been invented), I moved on to Sweet
Valley Twins and Friends. Then I read Sweet
Valley High, and then I tried to read Sweet Valley
University
Here I met
my match. At seven I couldn't read Sweet Valley University. The print was too
small. There were too many words. I got headaches when I read them. When I
complained to my mom she read a few pages, declared the content too mature for
me, and started paying more attention to what I checked out at the library.
As I grew,
I read more. I developed a problem distinguishing fiction with reality,
compounded by a macabre streak of creativity.
I read a book about twins with telepathic powers. I decided my best
friend and I were telepathic. My third grade teacher (oddly enough in one of my
few experiences in public school) told me the only way you could be telepathic
was if you lost your soul to the devil. I told my friend that unfortunately
we'd lost our souls to the devil and explained in vivid detail how he would
probably drag us to hell that night.
She wasn't
allowed to talk to me again.
In sixth
grade I ran into a similar problem with witchcraft. I'd begun reading books by
L.J Smith, Christopher Pike and R.L Stine.
After reading so much about witches my friends and I decided we were
witches. We'd get together and read the spells out of the books and watch
movies like "The Craft." Then one night we were "casting" a
spell in my yard, and suddenly my neighbors starting screaming. Shots were
fired, and a car peeled out of the drive way. They were never seen again.
I
discovered much later that they'd been going through a messy divorce, and had a
particularly bad argument when they discovered their son shooting a bee bee gun
into the siding of their house to drown out their arguing. The wife packed up
the kids and left, and the husband moved away. I'm glad no one was hurt,
because my friends and I were too scared to call 911 to confess that we might
have killed our neighbors.
After
that, my friends and I got very religious. We joined a local youth group and
began to read Christian Fiction. I read books by Bill Myers, Frank Peretti, and
Francine Rivers. This Present Darkness is still one of the creepiest books I've
ever read.
Unfortunately
my imagination got the best of me, because now instead of casting spells, my
friends and I were studying how to cast out demons. The difference between that
and casting pretend spells and thinking we could talk telepathically, is that
in the Bible belt there are few adults who will tell you demons are just your
imagination.
By the
time High School started, my friends and I had moved on to bigger and better
things. Somehow we got over the fact that fantasy books were satanic, and
starting reading Dragonlance, and Terry Goodkind novels. I devoured books,
often finishing a book a day so I could catch up to my friends in whatever
series they'd recommended. I also discovered a new way to act out what I read
in books. A socially acceptable way. Writing my own.
I started
with fan fiction and eventually branched into writing my own stories. For years
I babbled to anyone who would listen about the book I was working on. Looking
back, it was a terrible work of fiction that too closely resembled everything
I'd ever read thrown in a blender.
After I
started college, one of my favorite authors (Kelley Armstrong) came out with a
young adult counterpart to her book series. Since my obsession with reading
every single book a writer has ever written still holds, I preordered it. That
is when I rediscovered the young adult genre.
These
books were good. I'd loved my L.J Smith books, but there really wasn't any
comparison. The standards of young adult literature had improved sometime while
I was working my way through the Dragonlance series. From there I caught up on
all the popular YA fiction I'd turned my nose up at during high school. I read
Harry Potter, I read Twilight, Uglies, and just about every book I could get my
hands on. I enjoy YA books more than any other genre right now. Writers have to
concentrate more on the story because they don't have sex scenes or gory
battles to fall back on to fill space. The books are quickly catching up in
length, but there isn't room for the unnecessary story telling just to up the
word count that you see in a lot of adult fiction.
I've
always loved reading, and writing always came in a close second. My dream job
in high school was to be a slush reader for a big publishing house.
Then I
learned publishing houses don't pay their slush readers, they use interns. I
didn't particularly want to edit stories or work in any other division of
publishing. So now I volunteer my time slush ready for a small publishing
house. Consequently most of the books I read now haven't been released yet.
I still
read mostly YA books. I also write YA books. The first in my book series (not
the one from high school) is due for release in July. Pending sales, the rest
of the trilogy should be out shortly.
Despite my
preference for YA, lately my horizons have been expanding. My mom's group has a
book club. We read one book a month, and alternate who chooses the book and the
restaurant. Because of their more literary taste, I've read things like
"The Help," and "Water for Elephants," and "The Uses
of Enchantment." We also read mystery novels, and self help books. They
make fun of my YA choices, but when my month roles around we discuss not just
the one book I chose, but any other book in its series, because most of the
time they couldn't stop after the first book.
I've also
been reading a lot of children's books out loud to my two year old lately. My
husband and I recently started doing read alouds. We read a Bella book, and
then a chapter of a grown up book every night.
If we ever go on long trips I read out loud while he drives.
I just started running, and because music
doesn't create enough of a distraction, I purchased a subscription to Audible,
and listen to audio books when I run. It's great motivation. I can't hear the
rest of the story until I'm running.
Guest post by Kaitlin Bevis.
Kaitlin
Bevis spent her childhood curled up with a book, and a pen. If the ending
didn't agree with her, she rewrote it. She's always wanted to be a writer, and
spent high school and college learning everything she could so that one day she
could achieve that goal. She graduated college with my BFA in English with a
concentration in Creative Writing, and is pursuing my masters at the University
of Georgia.
Her
young adult fiction novel "Persephone," will be released this summer.
She also writes for Athens Parent Magazine, and truuconfessions.com.
Author's
Links:
