Yay! I did it! I got all caught up! This post marks my final Bloganuary Catch Up post. The next Bloganuary prompt I respond to will finally be right on time and all by its lonesome! 🎉 I hope it doesn’t get lonely without a little buddy post…
Day Twenty-One: Who is your favorite author and why?
There are so, so many talented and fabulous authors out there that I enjoy reading, but I think for this question I’m going to go way back to some of my reading roots. As a child, I was very into the Flowers in the Attic series by V.C. Andrews (Cleo Virginia Andrews, Virginia C. Andrews). I don’t know if it was the writing so much as the topical nature, which I found to be somewhat relatable (but on a whole different level)—the saga of horrifying family secrets and such, not the incestuous relationships it bred.
I came upon them one summer while yardsaling with my mom. It was early in the summer and I was mostly just tagging along for lack of anything better to do. My mom loved hopping from one yard sale to the next looking for interesting stuff, antiques, things to refinish. I remember getting excited because they had what I thought at the time was the entire series. It was actually only the first three.
Reluctantly, she let me buy them. She wasn’t really encouraging of how much I liked to read, by myself, in my room. In fact, on more than one occasion I was scolded and told to “Go outside and play like a normal kid.” But she let me buy them.
And I read them. All. Much too quickly.
I wanted to go yardsaling with her again the next weekend, yanno, to look for more books. As it turned out, those three books were supposed to have lasted me all summer. Oops!
Eventually I found my way to the rest of the Dollanganger family saga books and devoured them as well. I also read My Sweet Audrina and followed the Casteel family in the Heaven series.
I haven’t ventured further. Her stories were picked up midway through the third book in the Heaven series, I believe, by ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman, and I haven’t found myself as interested in reading on, though the list of novels he’s brought to life under her brand is quite long! Maybe I’ll revisit that one of these days.
While I haven’t read any of the newer stories, I will admit to having tuned in for a lot of the adaptations on Lifetime. 🙂
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Haven’t read any of them? Want to? Amazon has the Flowers in the Attic boxed set if you’re a fan of physical books, and if you prefer eBooks there’s the Flowers in the Attic series, Kindle edition,
Day Twenty-Two: What was your dream job as a child?
As a child child, I don’t really have any recollection of having a dream job. When I was a bit older—junior and into senior high—I first remember expressing interest in becoming a psychologist. I’m not really sure how that got moved to the wayside, but eventually it did. Later I thought I wanted to be both a high school English teacher AND a journalist/writer.
That’s actually what I was originally planning to go to college to pursue: double major in secondary education and journalism-focused communications. I’ve (somewhat) explained why that didn’t happen in a previous Bloganuary response (Bloganuary 2023 Catch Up: Days 17 & 18), so I’m not going to go over it again in this one, but I did eventually find my way to completing a degree in communications. I have to say, today’s communications degree (and the entire field in general) feels like it is a much, much, much different beast than it used to be.
But anyway, so here I am, working on the writer aspect of what I want(ed) to be when I grow (grew) up. 😉 We’ll have to see how it goes….
