Reading, Research and Rocks

Love of the written word is a subject close to my heart.  All the while I have been writing the INZARED, Queen of the Elephant Riders series I have done extensive digging into the lives of circus Gypsies in the 1800’s.  While the writing was awesome, the research reading was even better.

I love history of any kind, and delving into the lives of people in the pre-Civil War period was exciting.  I found a lot of minute details I didn't know.  Gypsies proved to be a fascinating people and the small wagon-circuses of the period were a delight to learn about.

There are a lot of people I should thank for my love of books. 

• Reading teachers throughout my school days introduced me to the classics and I developed above-average reading skills early in my life. 
• My parents were avid readers and from them I learned to really enjoy reading. 
• A librarian in the small town where I grew up let me help in the library and I spent many hours in a dank basement sorting books.  I still love the smell of musty bindings and paper to this day. 

It never ceased to amaze me as a young reader that characters contained within the pages of books could leap out and take over my whole being, causing me many sleepless nights as I read way later than my parents would have allowed me to, had they known.

I’m not sure where I got the love of fact-finding.  I read, research, and write every day and still the thrill of finding a little-known fact gets me excited every time it happens.

There are so many places to search online that I will never find out everything I’d like to add to my data files but that’s ok.  As long as others who love information as much as I do continue to post and share their knowledge I’ll continue to write fiction.  My only hope is that reading will be introduced to children as eager as I was to learn about the world around me and anything else that interested me.  Reading rocks!