How about 4 and 15?
4. do you like your name? is there another name you think would fit you better?
I’m gonna go backwards here. When I was in elementary school, I wanted my name to be Jasmine so people would call me Jazzy. My school had a thing where students worked in the cafeteria on a rotation, so I wrote Jazzy on my paper hat.
Now, I love my name. I think it fits, for one and, if I ever manage to get published, Holly [Middle name] [Last name] will sound like a nom de plume. The best thing about it is that all my siblings have biblical names and mine is the only pagan in the bunch. That’s 1/8 and I’m into it.
15. five most influential books over your lifetime.
This is tricky, but here goes:
1) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. It was the novel I read just because I wanted to. My other books won’t have a story, but it was like fate that I would find Jane Eyre. I was probably 11 or 12 and was flipping through the channels and stopped on a black and white movie already half way through, and ended up captivated by it. It was, of course, the 1943 Jane Eyre starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. Probably a week later, I was with my folks at Walmart and I always went to look at the books while they were at check out. That’s where I found their short-lived “classics” section and my first copy of Jane Eyre.
2) A green faux leather bound edition of Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. A friend got it for me in middle school and I loved it so much, I took it with me to girl’s camp. There’s a story there, too, but not as interesting and kinda sad.
3) Dracula by Bram Stoker. Vampires have been my “special interest” for almost my whole life. I just saw a book on them one day and my brain honed in. I read Dracula on my own, then again in college and grad school, when I wrote a paper on vampires and the folklore concept of liminality. It was fun. Anyway, Dracula is a book that inspires both passionate love and hatred in me. I’ve wanted to throw the book against the wall, time travel to just after Bram Stoker wrote/published it (I’ll let him have that) and kill him, and I’m awed by how pervasive the thing is. I think about it everyday.
4) The Wayward Children series by Seanan McGuire. This is obviously very recent for me, but true nonetheless. I love these books.
5) The Outside by Ada Hoffman. I was in the middle of this book when we found out that my brother was sick and when he passed away. It was, is the most bizarre thing and I can go into just how confusing death is, but I don’t want to be boring or maudlin. The reason the book matters at this time (it’s a good book, otherwise) is because it touches on how time is a lie and that’s a comfort after losing a loved one, especially one that I hadn’t seen in about 5 or so years. Lots of sci-fi books do this, but I was reading this one and I like it better.
