Okay that title was maybe slightly less than awesome. Maybe. But this story is not. First, a little back story. So my dad is big into Sci-Fi/fantasy. He read my sister and I The Hobbit when we were little. His bookshelves were stuffed with authors like Anne McCaffrey, Tad Williams, Tolkien, David Brin, and Orson Scott Card. I definitely inherited the Fantasy gene from him.
I used to stare longingly at To Green Angel Tower and make up stories to the cover art, promising myself that one day I would read it. I did and it was SO worth the wait (even in spite of that One Scene that made me seriously almost hurl the book down the aisle of the bus I was riding on at the time of The Scene. You know what I mean, Tad.)
(As if Tad Williams reads my blog. HA.)
(I just added this parenthetical aside because, you know, why not. I'm in one of those moods and this is my blog, so there's nothing you can do about it.)
Anyway, my mom tended to be more of a...non reader. When she did read a book it tended to have glossy photos of Nantucket and Tasha Tudor's house. She did have brief affairs with Margaret Truman, Rosamunde Pilcher, and Alexander McCall Smith. But she never fell in love with a genre so much as a particular writer at a particular time in her life.
As my twin sis and I approached adolescence we became slowly, as if by magic, exposed to a mysterious entity we were told was called Anime. This led us to the discovery of Sailor Moon, and many many tearful afternoons watching Serena and Darien fall in love and then lose their memories and then fall in love again. Sigh.
You couldn't get much Sailor Moon in the US back then and you can't now. So my twin and I were reduced to begging our mom to drive us to the comic books store just over the town line, where we could buy something we learned was called manga. Such was our obsession that we would buy the Japanese manga and just look at the pictures. Sad, I know. But also sort of awesome. Let it never be said that we didn't wholly embrace our obsessions.
Fast forward about fifteen years. My mom is now totally obsessed with Paranormal Romance. I might have gotten the Fantasy gene from my dad but I definitely got the Obsession gene from my mom. A couple weeks ago she started telling me what the "Fae" were. People, my book is about the fae. And just last week THIS happened:
MOM: Do you know what manga (pronounced "main-gah") is?
ME: Yeah. It's the book form of anime. It's what you used to drive us to the comic book store to buy.
MOM: Oh. (clearly not interested in this at all). Well, Sherrilyn Kenyon's books are coming out in a manga.
ME: Oh (clearly not interested in this at all).
I love that it took Paranormal Romance to introduce my mom to these things. Now there's a much higher chance that she'll actually read my novel...if I ever let her!
My dad is also the sci-fi fantasy parent. And my mom is similar-she used to read a lot, but not so much. Now it's just a few pages every once in a while (I think she's just too used to moving around and working, so it's hard to sit still and read). I'm really not sure if my mom will ever read my book about the fae. [I inwardly cringe every time she calls fantasy "junk books," even if she's never thinking about my writing genre of choice when she says it.]
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