Imagination is funny, It makes a cloudy day sunny

It's easiest to start at the beginning.

I cannot pinpoint at what exact time my journey in storytelling began. One of my first memories of playing with my brothers and cousins in my grandmothers back yard. We would watch Robin Hood, you know the Disney cartoon with the foxes? Then we went outside and took up the roles of the characters. It was one of our favorite games. Other times it was Care Bears(I liked to be the rabbit!), or Rainbow Brite(I would play the star girl... what ever her name was). The game was always the same; role playing in it's purist form. No rules, no restrictions. Pure pretend.

As we grew older the game changed a little. Mostly it changed as our entertainment matured. We went from Care Bears to Power Rangers, creating our own Power Rangers at this point. I think I was the Peach Ranger... And not too long after we went from Power Rangers to Star Wars. I created several characters for that game, including Lando Calrissian's sister and the only female pilot. Quite gleefully we would create new characters to fit into the universes and stories we loved, then spend an entire afternoon being these wonderful new personalities and acting out their dramas. Sometimes the games would stretch for days, each time we had to stop playing for chores or for dinner or bed time, we would pick the game up exactly where we left off the very next chance we got.

And as we grew older we began to create our own universes. The creative environment we surrounded ourselves in, looking back on it, it really gave me very solid foundations for writing and creating today. Everything inspired me then. An early summer day full of sunshine could have me wandering the back yard, pretending to be a medieval maiden secretly learning sword play in order to protect her home and family. A day inside the house, looking out the big windows in our living room had us on a space station, preparing for war against relentless alien forces. A winter day nice enough to play outside had me placed in a post-apocalyptic world of nuclear winter, where survival- and stopping the next world war- was crucial. Nothing was off limits; I was blessed with imagination and creation.

My roots in horror started one summer vacation. All by myself I was visiting my Grandma Kearl for a week down in Logan, one little girl in a large, old Victorian house. Left with only myself for company my own age, I became Corrie, a motherless girl sent to live with her grandmother while her father was in the army. Arriving at her Grandmother's house she learns something very shocking, the house is haunted and she can see and speak with the ghosts. And she learns there is far more to the world than even just ghosts; there are fairies and other creatures just as perilous. Yes, Corrie found a vampire wandering about that old Victorian house. My first vampire.

And with that I was hooked.