Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

The entire Harry Potter craze was running rampant by the time I picked up the first book. I'd heard about it the books being good but despite their praises on the news and the lips of my classmates, I wasn't interested. Even when one of my friends told me she was getting her aunt to pick up the British versions in an attempt to get them faster I remember laughing and thinking that the books she was describing, about a boy wizard and a school for wizardry, did not sound like they were worth that amount of effort. Witches, I would read about, but I had no interest in a male protagonist. 

Harry Potter was below me. 

My mother ended up getting Sorcerer's Stone in a second hand bookstore on sale, just in case. I ignored it at first, but everyone kept on telling me to at least try it. After about a month, I gave in.

I finished it in a day and was forever lost to the fervor that was Potterdom. J. K Rowling catapulted to the top of my list of favorite authors.

We got the rest of the books for Christmas: I locked myself in my room and read all of them in two days.

'This boy will be famous, a legend. I wouldn't be surprised if today was known as Harry Potter day in future. There will be books written about Harry, every child in our world will know his name.'

-Minerva McGonagall.

  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

This book was all it took to make me a Potterhead for life. The story is nothing new really: a young orphan boy with an unfortunate life learns that he is special, journeys to a new place, makes new friends, and has an adventure. This could be the plot synopsis for any book but Rowling's unique take on witches, wizards, and the society they live in reeled me and millions of others in. Harry Potter's entrance into the wizarding world is the reader's own and he holds you rapt as he navigates this unfamiliar terrain armed with humor and luck, trying to unravel the mystery surrounding him. By the end of the book you are in love with him, Hermione, and Ron; sad that he has to go back to the Dursley's; and desperate for the next book to come out. 

"I hope you're pleased with yourselves. We could all have been killed — or worse, expelled." -Hermione Granger

The humor was my first love in the story. The movies lose this, but Harry is hilarious. His point of view is filled with sarcastic comments and wry observations. The other characters are funny as well, intentionally or not. Ron's speech and actions often bring a smile to the lips as do Dumbledore's. Hermione's dedication to studying and school above all else including life are always good for a laugh. Draco's insults were amusing. And Snape's dry wit had me rolling even when he was putting people down. 

The characters were definitely my next love. Harry was my favorite at first, then the intelligent and bossy Hermione, and then Ron. But I also liked Severus Snape and Draco Malfoy. By my third re-read, the twins, George and Fred, were favorite characters as well. 

The setting was great. Diagon Alley was an interesting way to show how wizards lived among us and separate at the same time and Gringotts was everything you'd expect from a bank run by goblins. I wanted to go to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The school might be ridiculously dangerous, (staircases that change as you walk on them and a forest filled with deadly creatures where you are expected to serve detention) and the Headmaster dangerously lax about students' safety (because there were a million better hiding places for the stone than in a place with children) but I still wanted to be Sorted. I wavered between Slytherin and Ravenclaw as my house of choice. Ravenclaw was the house of the intelligent and studious, but Slytherin was for the cunning and it's students rocked green and silver as their colors.

All of these elements combined to make Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone an unforgettable reading experience and a source of inspiration for me. And the hints and foreshadowing to her future books that Rowling put in it helped make the entire series exceptional. 

'There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it …"

-Professor Quirell

Whitney Houston: The Queen of the Night

 "I've got the stuff that you want, 

I've got the thing that you need,"

She was one of my favorite artists and her music has featured on my writing playlists since I started making them. All of her songs have been played multiple times on my cassette player, Walkman, CD player, boombox, and iPod. I wore out the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack and the Bodyguard soundtrack. And though "I Will Always Love You", "When You Believe," Exhale (Shoop Shoop)," "I Want to Dance with Somebody", and "I'm Every Woman" will never leave my music list, my jam will always be "Queen of the Night".

 "I've got more than enough 

to make you drop to your knees"

To this day when the first rifts play over the radio or in a store, I stop what I'm doing and sing along. If it plays at home, I'm probably typing because this song ends up on every writing playlist I make. To me it screams power and assurance with a whole lot of cockiness, and it gives me that edge whether I'm writing a male or female character.

"'Cause I'm the Queen of the Night,

the Queen of the Night

oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah"

 Rest In Peace, Whitney, you will be missed.

L.J. Smith: The Secret Circle

L.J. Smith is the author who brought me solidly into the supernatural loving community. There are currently two television series based on her books: The Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle. Many have compared her to Stephanie Meyer and said that her books are like the much acclaimed Twilight series. They just have one major thing wrong:

L.J. Smith was first.

Long before Meyer's vegetarian vampires and imprinting werewolves,  Smith had vampires who refused to drink human blood and the soul-mate principle. Smith did it first, and in my opinion, she did it better. Smith had heroines with agency whose lives did not revolve around whether or not their vampire boyfriend loved them, and all of her series were engaging and interesting.

The Secret Circle is actually my second favorite series of hers.

 

The Secret Circle, as those of you familiar with the CW series know, is a young adult fantasy trilogy about witches. In this trilogy, the protagonist, Cassie Blake, moves with her mother to New Salem to be with her grandmother and family secrets come to call. After initially being bullied, Cassie is saved by Diana Meade, a popular girl who brings Cassie into the in-crowd. Here Cassie discovers that she is part of a coven of witches that has lived in New Salem for generations, a coven that is currently split. Cassie then has to deal with changing loyalties, love, how to control her magic, the truth of what happened to her parents, and an old evil that has been waiting for a chance to strike again.

“Now let me see, what shall we do to start this year off?  I feel like something really wicked.”  - Faye (The Initiation)

This trilogy made me appreciate the 'bad' girls. Faye Chamberlain is the 'bad' girl counterpart to Diana; amusing and snarky, with a 'I-take-what-I-want' attitude. At one point, I always root for her to win.

“The silver cord can never be broken.  Your lives are linked.  You can’t escape each other any more than you can escape destiny.”

(The Initiation)

The soul-mate principle was also an interesting concept, especially since the soul-mates in question tried their best to stay away from each other. To all familiar with imprinting, this was superior in that it was mutual and no babies were included. But it still annoyed me because I wanted the female soul-mate to end up with someone else.

This trilogy has always been one of my old favorites because it made me take another look at witches. I'd appreciated them, but this was BHP (Before Harry Potter) and vampires were my supernatural creature of choice. Then I read the first book, The Initiation, where Cassie was thrust into the madness.The magic of witches was not to be underestimated, I decided. The different ways of casting spells and the elemental magic gave an author another area to play around with. That earned this series a spot on my always crowded bookshelf.

 “Sky and sea, keep harm from me.  Earth and fire, bring my desire.” 

 (The Power)

 

Sailor Moon

"I fight for love! I fight for justice! And in the name of the moon, I'll punish you!!"
-Sailor Moon

or

"A sailor-suited pretty soldier of love and justice: Sailor Moon! In the name of the moon, I'll punish you!!"
-also Sailor Moon


Before Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh, there was Sailor Moon.

Naoko Takeuchi's manga turned anime, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, took the world by storm and gave new meaning to the planets of the solar system. The first season of Sailor Moon tells the story about a clumsy and often ditzy girl, Usagi Tsukino, who discovers that she has super powers and is meant to protect the world against evil. As Sailor Moon, she fights against the Dark Kingdom (or Negaverse) and gains allies in the inner senshi: Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Venus. As Usagi's fight progresses, she remembers a past life, finds love, and starts maturing into the leader that she was meant to be.

This show was the first anime to reel me in and get me truly hooked. It had been out for a while by the time that I sat down and watched it one day after school.  I despised the main character, Usagi or Bunny or Serena depending on your translation, because I considered her one of the most annoying and useless people in the whole show. She was whiny, got bad grades, and her sole motivation seemed to be video games and food. Even when she was Sailor Moon, I found her largely useless. Her first power is her tiara which she uses like a frisbee and then she gets the Moon Stick which she uses to purify and heal. I couldn't stand it. The other sailor senshi had power over the elements,  could summon fire or lightening or ice or metal, yet they still needed her whiny behind to defeat the enemy.

 I also disliked Usagi's love interest Mamoru (Darien). He was a jerk to her in the beginning and by the time he improved, his alter ego Tuxedo Mask had already poisoned me against him forever. Tuxedo Mask was the most useless character on the show. His outfit was, you guessed it, a tuxedo and a mask. His only power was his ability to show up at just the right second and throw a rose. That was it. He threw a rose, said something dramatic about believing in yourself then left. In a show where the main character is constantly talking about defeating people 'in the name of the moon', he managed to win the award for most corny.


 But every day, I had to be home by four to watch it. Despite my problems with the star-crossed couple, it was one of the few shows on the time that had female protagonists who didn't need males to save them. It had secret identities and magic. The main characters were juggling middle school and crime-fighting. I wanted a talking cat to show up and tell me that I was fated for more too.  This show actually got me to bypass books and spend a few extra dollars to get the manga. I knew the English theme song by heart and memorized the first verse and chorus of the Japanese theme song. I found midis of each senshi's theme song and tried to sing along to them in Japanese. Everything about this show drew me in and I felt like I knew the characters personally.


My favorite characters were Makoto Kino (Lita Kino) and Ami Mizuno, aka Sailor Jupiter and Sailor Mercury.

My reasons for liking them were simple. Makoto was tall and tomboyish and she was the green senshi. Ami was the smart and analytical one so I forgave her for her blue costume. The other sailors, especially Usagi, paled in comparison to them and I always imagined what the show would be like if they were the main characters. I began to tell my siblings about the world of Sailor Moon that I thought should exist and they loved it. So I began writing my own adventures and creating new characters.

Some of these adventures eventually became so distinct from Sailor Moon as to have no resemblance to the original except for character names. These stories became my first original fiction. 

Anita Blake

       I have to start out with one of the authors who did not just inspire me, but can also be considered the mother to an entire genre:

Laurell K. Hamilton

This woman’s Anita Blake series was one of my first inspirations for my original fiction. Reading her was a real treat because her heroine was a tough name-taking woman who wasn’t perfect but did her best and got the job done. 

 

 

"I know who and what I am. I am The Executioner, and I don't date Vampires. I kill them." –Anita Blake

  

The first book in the Anita Blake series was Guilty Pleasures. It brings us into the middle of the life of Anita. The novel is written in the first person so we experience everything that happens to her through her eyes with her often sarcastic and always humorous commentary.  The book starts quickly, taking you into a day in the life of Anita where the reader learns that she is animator, someone who raises zombies, that she is on retainer for St. Louis’s supernatural police, and that she is also now a legal vampire executioner. Anita ends up getting blackmailed by the current master vampire of the city, the forever pubescent  Nikolaos, into investigating vampire murders happening around the city. This investigation requires Anita to use her quick thinking and skill as she tries to avoid the advances of Jean-Claude, another master vampire, and face off with enemies who are stronger and faster than she is. Anita manages to triumph at the end, but her victory is not without consequences.

Besides the plot and Anita’s snarky comments, it was the little things in the book that made me love it:

1.       The World-Building- You learn very quickly that in this alternate universe so much like our own, vampires, werewolves, zombies, and all other manner of creatures that go bump in the night exist. And vampires have recently gained citizenship.  Necromancers, called animators, are paid to raise the dead for legal matters.  And that werewolves are victims of lycanthropy, a disease that is beyond their control.

2.       The Murder Investigation- The Anita Blake series is often put into horror section and this is one of the reasons why. Anita spares no detail when she’s investigating a crime scene; if she’s about to throw up or thinking about throwing up, you are going to know which piece of gore has caused it.

3.       Death- Not death the eventual mortal state, but Death the person. Edward was one of my favorite characters, an unapologetic sociopath willing to work on the side of ‘good’ for a price or challenge. 

Anita Blake came at the right time into my life. I had just finished reading the Night World series by L.J Smith(the predecessor of all things Twilight), and was looking for vampires. Anita Blake definitely filled my quota and then some. Since then, Guilty Pleasures and a few of Hamilton's other books have been made into comics.

 

"Guilty Pleasures treads a thin line between entertainment and the sadistic.  The Circus goes over the edge and down into the abyss.  And here I go inside.  Oh, joy in the morning." - Anita

It Begins

Welcome to my Discovery. 

I hope you're prepared to experience fantasy and science fiction in all of their forms as I move through the works that have influenced me and the ones that interest me.

Be prepared for books. (There will be Harry Potter)

Be prepared for movies. (There will also be Harry Potter)

Be prepared for television series. (Unfortunately, there will not be Harry Potter)

Be prepared for anime and manga.

Be prepared for video games.

Be prepared for music.

I'm an avid Potterhead and my interests range from the strong heroines protecting the streets from the supernatural to hobbits questing to destroy the one ring. Orange suit clad ninja will make an appearance alongside leather suited vampire enforcers and miniskirt wearing defenders of the planets.

Basically, be prepared for anything. Or to paraphrase one of my favorite authors: