Peter Pan, Meet Alice. She's in Wonderland.

I've been thinking a lot about the stories that you love as a kid, and how they shape your imagination and creativity...just how they affect you in general. I mean, Ray Bradbury was inspired by Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland," and it's pretty clear the affect it had on him (incase you're wondering why I'm talking about Bradbury so much, it's because I'm taking a class on him at Columbia ♥ ).

The stories rhat I loved as a kid, I still love now. Which means I read a lot of children's books and watch the more than occasional Disney movie, but goshdarnit, I'm not ashamed!

This could get tedious, but I'm about to list all my favorite children's books, so batten down the hatches, lovers! (And yes, I happen to have a list of them, including copyright dates and publishers, in the back of one of my journals. Because they all belong to my mom, and I want to get them...for myself, since I have no babies)
- Peter Pan
- Alice in Wonderland
- Robinhood
- Chronicles of Prydain
- Sleeping Beauty
- Rapunzel
- Twelve Dancing Princesses
- The Black Horse (Marianna Mayer)
- The Maiden on the Moor
- The Rough-Faced Girl
- Nicholas Pipe
- East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon
- Saint George and the Dragon
- The Little Mermaid (Hans Christian Anderson, illustrated by Dorothy P. Lathrop)
- The Sign of the Seahorse (One of my favorite memories about this book: I was probably 7 or 8 and my family rented a big beach house in the Outerbanks, NC with 2 other families, so there were a bunch of kids and we were all running around on the beach all the time, but then this one day, it rained all day. So all those kids who would normally be running around on the beach were stuck in this beach house and the parents were too and we were all going a little crazy. So, my mom got us all sitting in the living room and read us this book [and my mom is AWESOME at reading books to kids--she's a children's librarian, after all] and then sat us around the dining room table and told us we were having a contest: who could draw the best picture of something they liked from the story. So we all spent hours drawing and coloring and then all the parents judged the pictures and we each got a different award so we all felt awesome and we weren't going crazy anymore).
- The Canary Prince
- Melisande
- The Enchanted Wood
- Beauty and the Beast
- The Thirteen Clocks

I still get really excited to read those stories, to experience them, even though my understanding of them has changed since I was 6. So how do those stories touch my writing all these years later?

My mom is writing her thesis paper on helping young children choose books that will help them love reading, and so their imagination and creativity will bloom... And since I've been helping her out with it, I've been thinking a lot about that subject. My mom was ALWAYS reading to me, helping me imagine the worlds in the stories, the characters, the sounds of their voices. My childhood was all about telling stories and sometimes, I can't even describe TO MYSELF how thankful I am for that, and how AWESOME it was. I think the omnipresence of books, reading and story telling in my childhood is the reason I wanted to become a writer. I've never wanted to be anything else.

And I'm not kidding when I say I've never wanted to be anything else (OK, OK, there's one exception--when I was 5 or 8 or whenever it was that I saw Star Wars for the first time, I wanted to be Princess Leia when I grew up. That lasted for a while, but underneath, I'm pretty sure I wanted to be a writer still).

When I was younger, I was always writing stories. I'd illustrate them myself-- terrible, disproportionate pencil drawings of mermaids, castles, horses that were barely distinguishable as such, big leafy flowers, handsome gentlemen with scraggly hair... But whatever the quality of the illustrations (POOR), the stories were what mattered, what I concentrated on, what I love, love, loved. And they still are.

So yeah, I like writing. Take THAT, other professions I could have pursued!