Late to the Party

I was a late bloomer. I didn’t reach puberty until I was 14 (I blame that on the fact that I took ballet from the time I was three). I never had a serious boyfriend until well after high school (and never found my true love until I was well into my 30s). I discovered Stevie Ray Vaughn after he died in a horrible helicopter crash and soaked up all his music like a beach bum soaking up the sun. I started liking Motley Crue after they broke up and Van Halen when Sammy Hagar was the lead singer.

When my friends were rocking out to Def Leppard and Van Halen, I was listening to classical or nothing at all.

Always a day late and a dollar short.

I got to thinking about this when I added Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight to my to-be-read list on Goodreads. Whenever I update there, it pops up on Facebook. One of my FB friends commented, surprised I’ve never read the book. Yes, this was another example of one of those things. I’d always intended to read the Pern books but never got around to it. A high school friend commented that she loved them when she was younger and read them all.

It seems I’m always the last one to discover something awesome. I was well into my 20s before I started writing and knew it’s what I wanted to do when I grew up. I was never a big reader in my high school days. I hated reading the things they made us read. So when I did read, it was Clive Cussler novels. (Should I admit I wrote him a letter and told him I wanted to be a writer? I did. He actually wrote back, in his own hand. I wonder where that letter went…). I discovered romance when I was in my teens started reading Victoria Holt somewhere around the same time. It was later, much later, when I realized all the things I wrote involved a romance of some sort and had a happy ending with the two main characters.

I’m still writing stories with a romance involved and a HEA. I’m still the one who hasn’t read Twilight or Harry Potter or most of the Dan Brown books (I did read DaVinci Code and didn’t care for it). Maybe someday I will. Right now, I have Pern books to read.