For most of my life, I've daydreamed...not about common things, but about adventure, other places, magical worlds. Every night, as I waited to fall asleep, I would spin out stories involving the characters and situations I read about in books or saw in movies or on TV.

My first major series of adventures, at about age 6, were with Doctor Dolittle. No, I'm not talking about the Richard Pryor movie *shudder*, or even the old musical with Rex Harrison (although I did enjoy that movie). What I'm referring to is the series of books written by Hugh Lofting. I've met very few people who've read them, and they were getting scarce, even in libraries, by the time I was child. But they were definitely my favorite books. I can't recall many details of those adventures now, and I'm not sure that I ever adequately explained how a modern-day girl's family could possibly move to early Victorian England, but it was fun all the same.

The next set of adventures, and one that lasted for many years--from age 8 to age 11 and beyond--involved The Six-Million-Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. I first saw the $6MMan when I was 6--it was a Sunday night, I was bored out of my skull waiting for dinner, and the only thing on that looked even halfway worthwhile was this new show. By the end of the episode, I was hooked. Adventuring in this universe was the first time I ever took on a "fantasy" personna, as the young cousin of Jamie Sommers, orphaned and injured in a car accident and made bionic. Even a long time after I stopped actively adventuring in that universe, I'd have dreams about it that would prompt a brief spree.

Probably my most exciting set of adventures took place in the Star Wars universe. As the only child of elderly parents, I wasn't terribly "with it": I was the only person in my 6th grade class who hadn't seen Star Wars yet. By the time I "discovered" it, the movie was no longer playing at a local theater. That didn't stop me from reading the novel multiple times, collecting trading cards and posters, listening to the 8-track "The Story of Star Wars," and generally being a fan for several months before I managed to talk my parents into taking me to the big city to see it. I became "Tina Skywalker," Luke's little sister. I had an elaborate backstory to explain my presence and I had mentally rewritten the novel to include my character. (On an eerie note, in my version our father's name was Andrew...spookily close to Anakin.) In my version, Ben came back after a while (he wasn't exactly dead--some mysterious Jedi thing), Han Solo disappeared from the scene, and Tina ended up as the teacher/guardian of a group of children she had rescued, who had been left orphaned when their Rebel parents were killed by the Empire.

Maybe it seems absurd to have abandoned my imaginary world of Star Wars for that of Battlestar Galactica, but I really liked that show. (And what they did to it in Galactica 1980 was evil!) By this time, I had fallen into a pattern, and I decided to be Vanessa, another daughter of Commander Adama. Unfortunately, at first there didn't seem as much "scope for imagination" in that universe. But then found Baltar's daughter--once Vanessa's best friend--living in hiding in the fleet, and things got more interesting for the rest of my relatively brief Galactica adventures.

The summer I turned 13, I read The Lord of the Rings. Although there wasn't, again, as much "scope for imagination" as I would have liked, Tolkien's trilogy was simply too good not to be commemorated with a character in that universe. So Aragorn's cousin, Andrea, spent a while at the court in Gondor, trying to desparately find something interesting to do. Mercifully it didn't last long, because in October of that year I encountered the universe that became the center of my world for many, many years afterward....

Shannara. I know I hear groans out there. But The Sword of Shannara was, for me, what author Gene Wolfe calls "The Book of Gold." For me it wasn't a cheap copy of Tolkien; it was like Tolkien, yes, which is why--in my need for "more books like that"--I read it. But for me it was a splendid, interesting world in its own right, and I just had to play in it. The large Shannara section of this site reflects the result.

Nothing afterward was what Shannara was to me, although I spent some time on Pern and Darkover. In adulthood, more and more of my imaginings have centered on the universes of my own writing. But I will always be fascinated by the worlds I find in books and the interesting country that is "the past."