Dear Mr. White, This is all your fault.

Word Count Status: Unchanged. My copyedits for The Sevenfold Spell came in and I had to work on those, and then of course I needed to reread the whole thing, because this is the version that is "final".

RedRoom had a blog post idea that I found interesting--they wanted you to write a letter to your favorite author. I took the idea and changed it a bit: write a letter to the author who inspired you to write fiction. Please feel free to do this as well. Here's mine:

Dear Mr. White,

This is all your fault. If I had not read The Once and Future King, I might have had a quiet life, free from any writing urges. Instead, you had to go and make the craft of writing a novel look so darned fun, which of course, is how it turned out for me.

Because of your Pellinore, I tried my hand at writing humor. Because of your Wart, I am not afraid of letting my characters look foolish to the other characters for a while—as long as they don’t look foolish to the reader. Because of your Lancelot, I’m not afraid of writing about plain and even outright ugly characters. Beauty gets boring, but ugly can be surprisingly interesting.

After I finished The Once and Future King for the umpteenth time, I tried to write a story about a knight who was heavily based on your Lancelot. His name was Gilbert Von Roth, and he was a knight in the First Crusade. He had carrot-red hair and was horribly clumsy--unless he was in battle. Then, he was a deadly whirlwind. He was the first character I ever fell in love with.

It took me years, Mr. White, to stop writing in a voice that imitated yours.

So this is all your fault. And for that, I thank you.

Yours truly,

Tia Nevitt

(If you write a letter, please let me know!)