A Life in Books

Starting from when I was a crawling infant, books have fascinated me. In those early days, books about animals, particularly dogs, were my pleasure. I was content to sit on the floor—next to all the books I'd dropped and scattered in my search for the tops favorite doggy book—and turn the pages of that book backwards and forwards for a long time. My mother had to replace that book thrice, because my toddler hands weren't particularly friendly to it. Nonfiction children's books were my schtik then, not storybooks. "Animals don't wear clothes," my two-year self scoffed.

However, right around the time, I entered into my memory, i.e., I became aware of myself and could recall myself doing things, I was always be found listening to my mother or my grandmother read me stories. Whenever my grandmother came to visit, every afternoon after lunch and right before her siesta, she would tell me one of her stories. On some trips, she brought fiction magazines along with her. Sometimes, she would tell me a story she'd memorized just for me, and sometimes, she would simply make one up. Sunday afternoon storytimes were saved for my mother and the tales in the Sunday newspaper.

Mousie, mousie was the first story I learned to read. Once I discovered I could do it all by myself (and didn't have to wait hours until lunch was over), I wanted to learn to read as fast as I could. I pestered my dad, my cousins, visitors, anyone who knew how to read and didn't mind my stumbling over the most basic words. I was a diligent student then, because I realized the freedom there was to be had in being able to read. However, I was also surprised to discover that my interest in being told stories did not wane.

Around the summer I turned eight, my mother felt that she needed to give me a jump-start onto the road to reading the classics, the masters. So she took me to a professor of English at the university, who might be able to recommend a few books to me. When we visited the professor at home, to my horror, she had a pile of twenty thick, dusty hardcovers minus their jackets sitting on a table next to her chair. These she told me were the most classic of the classics. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Little Women were part that set, but I was in too much shock to care. I saw my entire vacation wasted in a dreary bookish fashion. I also knew protesting was futile, so I picked those books up and returned home, with a coerced promise that not only would I read them all, but that I would recite a précis of each book on the day I returned them. Pouf! Two months down the drain.

Ah, but Genteel Readers, this was not the case at all. It was a seminal period in my reading history. I had discovered The Romance Novel. The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Scarlet Pimpernel were in that lot, too, and they were all romantic tales with swashbuckling heroes performing heroic deeds of honor and deviltry. I was hooked. When I surfaced from my required reading, I started noticing my friends giggling over certain books, reading some passages aloud amongst them and sniggering, stealthily exchanging said books, and making sure that those books did not land in curious tween hands, like mine. The more they hid and carried on in hushed giggles, the curiouser and curiouser I became and all the more determined to lay hands on them.

I bided my time, and one day a Mills and Boon book fell in my sticky hands en route from one friend to the other. I spirited it home and accompanied by blushes, glgggles, a flashlight, and a dictionary: I. Read .It. Then I discovered the source of their stash. I joined a circulation library, ponied up all my allowance for the privilege of brazenly borrowing the naughty Barbara Cartlands, Anne Mathers, and Betty Neels. I also discovered Enid Blyton, Francine Pascal, and Nancy Drew. Since I openly read the latter set, those were the ones my parents came to dislike. (Thank goodness they never discovered the romances.) "That blighted Blyton" was my dad's oft-voiced exasperation over the sight of me still in my school uniform on the yellow couch in front of the balcony doors, when he returned home from work an hour and a half after my return from school. In defiance of the blight, I penciled a short book Enid-Blyton-style on farm life in rural England. It was much pooh-poohed by the family. I gave up writing.

I moved away from the categories when I discovered Georgette Heyer at fourteen. I was now into big books with bigger stories.This rejeuvenated my interest in the romantic classics, and some of them like The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, I read in every format it was published in, including the unabridged 1300-page doorstoppers. I continued to read the Enid Blytons though. (Er, I still do.)

High school was when I discovered that not only what I wrote was good, but that people wanted to read it. At that time, it was literary criticism pieces and essays, but my two English teachers were full of praise and support of my writing, and that gave me more and more confidence to put words on paper. Reading took a backseat as I took the time to write, but the writing was solely to impress the teachers. I wrote because they were convinced I could write, not because of an inner urge or a belief that I could write even without the encouraging words. So, you can guess what happened next, Genteel Readers.

I went to engineering school, and I stopped writing. Then it was onto to graduate school, then a move to the west coast, a software engineering job, marriage, and childbirth. This was life, and it was super busy, but I returned to my first love: reading. I also took year-long certificate courses in fiction writing, nonfiction writing, and editing, and followed those up with internships with a book publisher and a magazine. Being home a lot with an infant gave me a lot of time to think. That led to a freelance career in fits and starts: book reviews, magazine articles, proofreading, and book doctoring.

Then came the seminal moment in June 2006 when I discovered romance author blogs Squawk Radio and Risky Regencies on an aimless web-surfing night. I was so completely taken in and made to feel at home, there was no question of not returning every day to read and later on to comment. And hope unfurled within me: I, too, would like to write a romance novel. Not some day, but starting right then. So, I did. Two medieval novels, one set in Scotland in the 1100s and another in England during the time of King Alfred the Great. Then I spent months wallowing in despair that I would never be a published author.

Then there was another seminal moment: three change coaches came into my life with the new year of 2008. They came bearing gifts: a safety net, a supporting cushion, a bottom kicker, and a hard nose. Their self-imposed goal was to make me want to be all that I can be (quoting Joan Kayse), and then to make me do it.

So, Genteel Readers, tell me how books have played a part in your lives.
Did you always want to be a writer? When did you pen your first novel?
When did you first openly admit to a stranger in a coffee shop that you write romance novels?