IWSG: Books that Influenced Me as a Kid; Easing Off the Writing

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) blog hop! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. May raced by and so we're already in June! I always look forward to summer as it approaches. I really don't know why since I hate the excessive heat it brings. (It’s gotten to the one-hundred tens in Northern California where I live!) Maybe it's just the thrill of upcoming summer movie releases or making a reading list. I do read slightly different types of books in my genre, speculative fiction, in the summer than I do at other times of the year. But my summer reading list I’ll save for another post. For this post I answer the optional monthly IWSG question which emphasises books and reading. I also have some latest progress on my current writing projects. So, keep on readin'!

IWSG  Question for June

The IWSG question of the month is: What were some books that impacted you as a child or young adult? I had a lot of books that impacted me when I was a kid. But there's a few in particular that I remember and that set me on my way to avid reading and even getting into writing my own stories. I'll start with a book that the teacher read to us in my third-grade year of summer school. It was called "The Weird Witch's Spell". It was a book of ghost stories and other strange tales, and that started me on my way to reading supernatural horror fiction. It even played a part in my love for science fiction since one story the teacher read to us, "The Cure" (nothing to do with the punk rock band) featured humanoid aliens that literally had eyes in the back of their heads. That furthered my interest in science fiction monsters. 

When I was in the fourth grade, a student teacher of ours got me hooked on the “Choose Your Own Adventure" series of books. In these books, you as the reader are the protagonist, the hero, and you read through the book by making choices that determine what page you will turn to next. That series made me change my view of reading in that it made me realise that reading isn't only the acquisition of knowledge or a form of entertainment—it’s a journey. 

That following year, I bought a young reader's novel that was an animal parody of "Dracula" called "Bunnicula". I was okay with the story back then, but wouldn’t bother reading it as an adult. But I have to give it this much credit: one of the characters, an avid reading cat, lead me to my discovery and love of Edgar Allen Poe's work. That love added to my passion for the ghost and horror story and eventually made me want to write my own as I do today.

Latest Writing Progress

Now a little on my writing progress. As far as my blog goes, I have to confess that I've been missing posting on a weekly basis. I had been burning out from stress and anxiety for a couple of weeks. I was trying to cram too much activity into too little time and so it was even leading to headaches and dizzy symptoms. So, I decided to ease off writing the blog a little and focus more on working on my latest book of short stories, "Bad Apps". My latest progress on that is that I just yesterday finished revising for basic organisation for a new short story. Next will be revising for more in-depth organisation and character interaction. 

For more details on the latest progress of "Bad Apps", subscribe to my free newsletter, "Night Creatures' Call". I probably sound like a real hypocrite saying that, since I’ve said in the last month that the newsletter would be in people’s in-boxes within a week but then it wouldn’t be in there. I greatly apologise for that. I've just kind of slowed down on putting it together for the same reasons I mentioned above about the weekly blog posts. But the core of it, the Book-In-Progress, is completed, and so the other sections will be easier to put together and so it will be out by this weekend. Keep checking back here for it or at my Facebook page. 

What books impacted you as a child or teen/young adult? What have been your latest writing projects, and/or what have you been reading lately?

Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts: PJ Colando, Pat Garcia, Kim Lajevardi, Melisa Maygrove, and Jean Davis! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels! 

Until next time . . .