Lynn Flewelling

In grade school I attracted no notice for my burgeoning creativity. I won no prizes, published no precocious early poems or essays. I was not a precocious reader, either. The summer before I entered the fourth grade my mother became concerned and told me that I had to read a chapter of Jack London's Call of the Wild each day before I could go play with my friends. It was a fortuitous choice on her part. If she'd given me the wrong sort of book, I might not be a writer today, and therefore be stuck in some mundane career making a reasonable living. But I loved it and began spending far too much time with my nose in a book. I devoured London that summer, sailed off with Dr. Doolittle, discovered the lurid action tales in the True magazines my father kept in his night stand drawer. From there I moved on to more action, horror, gothics, and fell completely and permanently in love with Sherlock Holmes. Under my mother's guidance, Poe, Twain, Gallico, and Steinbeck became early favourites as I got older. I attempted her folio edition of Shakespeare and pined for the forbidden copy of "Rosemary's Baby" kept on an upper shelf. Once I started baby-sitting, I developed the uncanny ability to ferret out porn novels and sex manuals. My horizons broadened.

By my early teens I was writing short stories. A few teachers got rather excited about them -- in my first attempt at social satire, I cast my seventh grade teachers as various breeds of dog in a dog pound. I understand it caused quite a stir in the teacher's lounge. However, no one acclaimed me a prodigy and writing was not considered a realistic career choice.

Around that time an early boyfriend put Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man into my hands. My passion for him didn't last, but that for Bradbury and science fiction did. And with Bradbury, the die was well and truly cast, though it would take me years to really claim the winnings; I wanted to be a writer. Later, during my freshman year in high school, another friend lent me his tattered copy of Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring. (We didn't foresee it at the time, but seven years later we ended up married to each other. I don't know if Tolkien had anything to do with that.)

Since writing wasn't a realistic [sic] job choice, I decided to be a veterinarian instead, but my guidance councilor nixed that one, too; women couldn't get into vet school. (I learned later that women in fact did get into vet school; the guidance councilor's son, however, had washed out.) Foolish me, I believed her. Instead, based on my high scores in writing and language, she encouraged me to become - a teacher!

I still had the writing bug, though, and went so far as to take the only creative writing course offered at my small university. It was taught by a gentle poet who read my early stories of action, adventure, fantasy, and sexual weirdness with alarm. At one point he called me into his office and asked if I had trouble at home. I stopped writing for a while.

By the time I graduated I knew I didn't want to teach. I married the guy who'd given me Tolkien, moved to Oregon, and drifted through a few jobs, into and out of veterinary school. By now I was writing again, and even managed to get fired from a job for writing when I should have been doing other things. It was all very traumatic at the time, but the scribblings that got me terminated eventually developed into my first published novel, Luck in the Shadows.

We relocated to the Washington, DC area, where I fell into my first professional writing job at an ad agency. I began as a proofreader, but let slip to my boss that I'd like to give copywriting a try. In spite of my complete lack of advertising training, he handed me an account and said, "Great, you can do it." As it turned out, he was right.

A few years later, after the birth of our second son, we moved back to Maine. There, with the same laser-like career focus that had taken me so far, I wandered blindly into newspaper journalism and ended up interviewing people like Stephen King, Anne Rice, William Kotzwinkle, and Dr. Ruth in between book reviews and articles on lawn care.

Stephen King was my first "celebrity" interview and, for an aspiring writer who also happened to be a long-time fan, it was rather like interviewing God. He was funny, charming, and forthcoming. He thought it very amusing that I'd read The Stand on my honeymoon and gave me a signed copy of the newly released Author's Cut edition. He also complimented me on the sort of probing questions I asked about his writing process. When I managed to mumble out that I was working on a book myself, he wished me luck. Now, in a perfect world that would have been the moment when the Big Name Author took me under his wing and smoothed the way for me to become Rich and Famous. He didn't, of course, and I remain grateful for all his books taught me about plot, tension and how to scare yourself at the keyboard late at night.

It was Cathie Pelletier, an author with no connection to genre literature, who really put my feet on the path. I admired her tremendously, too. Her early books, The Funeral Makers and Once Upon A Time On the Banks, (Go look them up on Amazon as soon as you finish this scintillating screed) were set in the Maine I knew (logging, not lobsters) and had made quite a splash with the critics. So I screwed up my courage once again, stuffed all memories of my college writing class deeply down in my back brain, and took a workshop with her, wondering what she'd make of the fantasy manuscript I had in progress. I still approached with a great deal of trepidation; by now I'd picked up on the subtle concept that exists among some non-genre writers that fantasy writing is the basement of the literary ghetto and that as a writer of such, I probably had no business breathing the same air as "real writers."

Cathie loved my work. She praised it to the skies, offered constructive guidance, and ultimately tried to hook me up with several agents. They didn't handle fantasy, of course, but sent nice letters offering to look at any non-genre work I might do in the future. I felt legitimate at last and I am eternally grateful to Cathie for that. She later told me that other writers had done the same for her and that if I wanted to thank her, I should pass on that kind of help to others. I've certainly tried, and with the same admonition.

Long story short, my first novel did sell a few years later, and became the first book of The Nightrunner Series. I've published a few articles and short stories since then, too, but my mind seems to work best in novel mode. My latest, The Bone Doll's Twin, is set in the Nightrunner world, but in a different time and quite a different voice. It's a much darker book, and one that I claim as my most autobiographical, albeit in a twisted and much mutated form. My older son, now 16, describes it as "disturbing, but in a good way."

Ironically, since the books started coming out, I've found myself doing some teaching after all - writing and creativity workshops, mostly - and loving it. I think they feed my deep-seated need to give beginning writers the kind of early support and guidance I wish I'd had myself, and to live up to Cathie Pelletier's directive: Pass it on.