My love of books began at an early age, and I grew up to be “that guy” who always had a paperback book stuffed in his pocket. When I worked in San Francisco, I would literally read while walking from the BART station to the office because, of course, I couldn’t stop reading until the end of the chapter!
I don’t know why I was bitten by the speculative bug—meaning I almost exclusively read science fiction, fantasy and horror. So much writing advice admonishes us to “read outside our genre” and, yes, I sometimes have stumbled across great works that I can’t put down (hello, Flavia de Luce!), but even then I can’t help missing the speculative element, be it magic or high tech or the supernatural. So it is no wonder that my writing focuses on these speculative genres!
Some of my fondest memories come from when my reading tastes solidified somewhere around fifth grade and evolved into high school. Maybe it was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle or Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien or The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis that steered me to this path, but by the time I was in middle school, I was obsessed with Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter, not Tarzan, thank you very much), not realizing I was reading books published decades earlier. Of course, there was Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, but then I discovered Robert Heinlein’s juveniles and then his adult works in high school, which led to Niven, McCaffrey, Pohl, Asimov, Le Guin, King, Ellison, and by the time I was an adult, I was an exclusive reader of science fiction, fantasy and horror.
Now, I remember books I read when I was a kid more than I remember books I read last month. When I turned to writing, I decided to focus on those types of books. They’d be speculative, of course, but they would be aimed toward those who first fall in love with reading at a young age. These are the most memorable books, the most special books, the most important books that we carry with us for the rest of our lives.
