w o r d s

When I was about 13, I fell in LOVE with a book by Eve Forward called Villians by Necessity, which my grandmother had bought for me at an everything for a dollar, going-out-of-business book sale. It was a fantastic tale of good and evil, light and dark, magic and criminals; the main characters were an assassin, a thief, a druid and a twisted lady-vampire. I literally carried it with me everywhere for a long, long time, drew on all the pages, marked off all of my favourite parts, lent it to my friends (aka, insisted that they also read it) and memorized passages (which I still remember). I also drew some pretty terrible fan art.

This book inspired me to create my first character, a blonde, blue-eyed assassin named Nick Macabre--except that, because I was 13, I pronounced it Maca-bray and thought it sounded like some kind of bony stingray. I went through a serious assassin phase after that (what is that?); I even asked the same grandmother who had bought me the book to sew me a black cloak for Halloween (and I felt excellent skulking around the darkness wearing it and Doc Martens--I suppose it's no wonder that I later also went through pseudo goth phase).

In reality, I'm a BIG believer in non-violence (and always have been), but there was something so terribly romantic about a thoughtful, articulate man, well educated in the ways of weapons and poisons and snuffing corrupt political figures. I guess that was just my teenage bad-boy phase; instead of crushing on punks in leather, I was into medieval anti-heroes.