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.)