It's all my Mother's fault

I recently realized I can blame all of my struggles and frustrations about finding an agent on my Mother.

If it weren't for her influence, I could write some very commercial, very fluffy teenage alien fallen angel vampire romance that agents would snap up and publishers would fight over at auction because it would make everybody millions. But I can't.

While growing up there were plenty of romance novels floating around to temper our teenage hormones, but they were bedtime reading. Something to fall asleep with that didn't require thinking. The reading equivalent of TV's The Bachelor.

Don't get me wrong. I fell asleep to many a romance novel plucked from the free box at the front of the library. But they had nothing on C.S. Lewis, E.L. Konigsburg, A.A. Milne, Dr. Seuss or Madeleine L'Engle. Those were the books Mom bought and kept on the shelves. Those were the ones that had me at hello.

Those and the small puberty books, with simple diagrams, which also found their way onto our bookshelves and substituted for my Mother's sex talk.

So I can't write fluff (or be Fluffy). I write stories that matter to me. So that I think, and laugh, and sometimes even cry.

And it's all my Mother's fault.