The Evolution of An Author
There was no such thing as rated PG-13 in my parents' house; I grew up watching mostly B-rated horror movies. My siblings and I watched Joe Bob Briggs's Drive-In Theater every Friday night. You could easily find us in Blockbuster renting the new Clive Barker, Wes Craven, Sean Cunningham, Sam Raimi, and John Carpenter movies. We also watched the Twilight Zone, Tales from the Crypt, Stephen King movies, and Night of the Living Dead. My siblings and I would walk around like zombies chanting, "brains". I remember waking up in the middle of the night to watch the 1931 Dracula. There wasn't a movie or TV show too scary. I also enjoy a good mystery which leaves me guessing until the end.
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I started writing at an early age, though not as a hobby. It never failed; each year the teacher would have us introduce ourselves and proclaim what we did over summer break. My peers regaled the class with stories of theme parks and oversea getaways. I spent every summer doing chores, so I spun a few words and created vivid vacations.
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I was a teenager when I started writing as a hobby. Our TV went out and my parents could not afford to buy another. Boredom set in, so I wrote my own scary story. While I was creating plots and character names, I realized I could implant myself into my creation. I could make myself the villain, the heroine, the victim, or hide Easter eggs about myself within the story. Writing remained a hobby well into my thirties until Larry Eber Taylor.
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Larry was my husband's grandfather. He was a man I respected and admired deeply. He had a shingles outbreak that left him all but blind. We were visiting grandpa when I was typing Disturbance in The Darkness: A Fated Encounter. He asked if I would read to him and so I did. Grandpa gave me the greatest compliment. He told me I had a talent "to make a blind man see".
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I never intended to publish the story; however, grandpa insisted I print it. On August 2019, doctors gave grandpa four months to live. Per his request, I published the book. It was the only thing he ever asked of me. I changed the name of a side character to Eber and put grandpa in my acknowledgements. As the cliché goes, the rest is history.
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