My Relationship with Books

To be a writer, first you must be a reader. (I think someone important said that.)

My first interaction with books was when my mother would build me little forts out of books, and I'd choose one to pore through. I don't have any memory of this, but mum insists it was really cute.

My first memory of books was reading in the dead of night. When I was a child, I was scared of the dark (still am, come to think of it), so the light in the hallway outside my door was lit until one of my parents woke up or so. Each night, I'd wait for my parents to fall asleep, and creep out into the hallway and sit right down on the floor with one of the numerous books I'd borrowed from the library.
That was how I'd read most of the Harry Potter books, and the Lord of the Rings, as well as playing Pokémon Silver. When I heard the creak of my parent's bed, or the sigh of them being roused from sleep, I would hustle back to bed and pretend I'd been asleep. If I was lucky, it would be a false alarm, and I could go back to reading until it was time for school.
To this day, I have reading-induced insomnia.

When I was in highschool, reading was never really cool, so I stopped it for the sake of joining in with my friends. What they didn't know was that I was devouring books like Les Miserables and attempting at War and Peace. I was the first one in my group--and probably the school--to read Twilight, and thought it meh before moving on to real vampire books like Anne Rice's series.
I'd also spend my nights reading fanfiction, or original fiction online, on fictionpress and its sister site. I must have read hundreds of words worth of books in those years.

It was only when I had graduated from highschool, when I'd removed myself from several toxic relationships, that I'd enveloped myself in the world of books.
I firmly believe that it was my lack of books during my teenage years that made me so heavily suicidal. Now years later, I have my books and I feel so much better.

Books are magic. Everyone says that, and that's because it's true. Twilight was so popular because girls could leave their boring/over-complicated/abusive/etc'd lives for a little while. And it's because I can leave myself for so many hours at a time that I've been able to cope with depression.

And with the devouring of books came the inevitable writing of books. I'd run out of books I'd wanted to read. I'd read everything on fictionpress; so I wrote something I'd want to read.
That part still remains. Right now I'm in the mood for selkie/mermaid hybrids and the end of the world and human sacrifices, and that's exactly what I'm writing.
Write the book you want to read (I'm sure someone definitely said that.)

Writing Superstitions

Happy Friday the 13th!
So, today is obviously a day that makes some people very superstitious. I'm not one of those people, but I do have general superstitions when it comes to writing. I can't tell you how hard I had to think to come up with these superstitions and habits--it's all rather subconscious, isn't it? I mean, I have OCD, and even I don't know exactly what kind of quirks I have, except the ones people have pointed out to me.

So, onto my superstitions and habits concerning writing:

The mystical writing hat

• I like to wear my writer's hat (shown on the right)
• I like to have a warm, sugary drink on hand
• Writing every day has proved to make me more productive, but I can't always make that, because of time constraints or pure laziness
• I have to have the right font for my story. Luckily, most of my stories so far have been Arial Narrow, size 11, but, it can sometimes change depending on... well, I don't know, subconscious stuff, I guess
• Each story has its own playlist, and I can't write to the wrong kind of music. For example, my newest WIP has a playlist that consists of a lot of Skrillex, Metallica, Motley Crue, Fear Factory, and generally just a lot of different kinds of metal. The right music can work wonders, but if I listen to something that just doesn't suit the story at all, it can put me in a writing funk
• I don't like talking about my stories too early on in the writing process. Mainly because of two reasons: 1) What if it turns into a bum idea? I'd have let down all these people who were looking forward to reading it, and it ended up going nowhere. 2) I know this is silly, but I'm afraid that someone will steal my ideas. I love originality, and I'm sure this sounds very arrogant and up-myself, but I like to think that my stories have some level of originality to them. I wouldn't want anyone stealing my precious ideas. 
• Writing in my house is hard. This is less of a superstition, and more of an observation, but I get so distracted by my puppy, by the internet, by pretty much everything. I like to go to coffee shops or the park, and just sit and write for hours. That's why I got so much writing done during my first semester of uni: because I was writing on my breaks.
• When I'm editing, I have to print out the entire manuscript, and I can only write on it in angry red ink. 
• I cannot write my story out of order. Absolutely cannot. I like my things to be organised in a nice linear order. Unless the story is supposed to be all over the place, then I'll write the non-linear story in the way I envision the non-linear-ness to be. 

Okay, so maybe I'm a wee bit weird. 

Do you have any odd superstitions or habits while writing?