I learned to read at the age of three.  Not my alphabet, and not picture books. I read everything. My mother's books, the backs of cereal cartons, encyclopedias, everything I could get my hands on. My eye doctor told me once that the reason I'm so nearsighted is that I learned to focus on pages instead of playgrounds.

My mother didn't believe in children's books and I was in college before I read my first Dr. Seuss. Instead, she and my father lent me books from their libraries, which were formidable, since both of them are writers. I was reading Ayn Rand and Steinbeck before I was eight. My father encouraged me to read the classic science fiction and horror novels he'd grown up on. I loved Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon, and "The Monkey's Paw" was one of my first memories. When I was nine my mother introduced me to THE CHILD BUYER. I'm not sure if there was a hidden message in there or not.

Once they counted their books and between them they had nine thousand volumes. There were books on every wall and in every corner, and some even stacked in the  kitchen shelves. There was a time before college when I read at least one book every day, and when my mother would take me to the library and I'd check out seven books, I'd invariably have them all read by the next day. To say I was addicted was an understatement. I read to breathe.

I also learned to write in cursive at four and started keeping a journal in a spiral notebook. That journal has turned into a storage space filled with journals up to the ceiling. Some of them were about the mundane details of my day. Some of them were filled with short stories and my first attempts at novels. I think when I was ten I wrote a six hundred page novel about a French girl who lived in the Swiss alps, and I read it to all my cousins over the course of a summer. Luckily for me they were younger than I was and had to pretty much do what I told them to, including listening to endless descriptions of places I'd never been.

One thing I did not do was read my parents' novels. I didn't want to know that much about them, and I'd already figured out that even when you're writing fiction a great deal of what you put on the page should be written in blood. They were both well-regarded, but they understood my need to wholly think of them as my parents and not as authors! And they understand that they are respectably requested not to read my series of books, EDEN'S JOURNEY, even though only the first one, THE MOTH, is out.

After all, my blood is in that book…