It Was a Really Good Reason...

Yeah, so...I missed the deadline of the Spark Blogfest. Whoopsie! And I was so excited about it too! Well, in my defense, the night before I'd planned on blogging, I had an intestinal problem that kept me awake all night, but I won't go into details. I know this won't count as part of the official blogfest, but I want to answer the questions anyway. And I'll make up my tardiness by the end of this post. Promise!

The SparkFest questions:

What book made you realize you were doomed to be a writer?

I don't think it was any particular book or author, but around 3rd to 4th grade I got into Judy Blume's books and that's when my love for reading really took off. By 6th grade, I'd discovered the fantasy genre with books like The Hobbit, A Wrinkle in Time, and the Chronicles of Narnia. I was hooked, and it was about that time when I started writing stories of my own.

What author set off that spark of inspiration for your current work in progress?

Two things: The first was from a book I read a little over a year ago, Bones of Faerie by Janni Lee Simner. The trees in the main character's world are very creepy and dangerous, which immediately intrigued me. As the story evolved, the forest ended up being a bit different from how I'd imagined at first. Not a bad thing, but I started playing around with ideas of a story with the kind of forest I'd had in mind. Then I thought I should tie it into the steampunk story I'd been trying to develop, and have the forest itself  be the main reason the characters need to travel in airships. The second spark of inspiration for Cobalt, as I've recently mentioned, was the music from a couple of great steampunk bands.

Is there a book or author that changed your world view?

Anne McCaffrey, author of the Dragonriders of Pern novels, taught me so much about world building and bringing characters to life. I don't think the spark to keep writing would have burned so strongly during my teenage years if I hadn't been so avidly reading her books.

That's it, I guess. Oh--I did say I was going to make up for missing the deadline! So here's a randomly weird video to confuse and confuffle you. It's whited out in parts because I didn't want anyone seeing my nasty carpet!