K.L. Nappier

I do! Actually, depending on how you look at it, I had two starts as a writer. When I was very, very young, before learning my letters, I drew all my stories. My parents said I wanted to be a cartoonist (a natural assumption since I was always drawing a series of picture stories) and so I figured that must be what I wanted, too. I had a long- standing fantasy of working for Walt Disney for most of my childhood and well into my early teens, even while I *was* writing.

It wasn't until I learned to read and write that I realized what I had been doing with my drawings as a kid. By the time I wrote my first full-fledged story -I was around twelve or so- I was deeply influenced by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, the old movies "Dracula," "The Wolfman," and "Frankenstein," and the TV series "The Twilight Zone."

Around eighth or ninth grade, the Gothic soap opera "Dark Shadows" became all the rage. It's probably no coincidence that it was about then that my first fully fledged story became a serial that I called "The Castle." Very Goth. No surprise there. Very amateurish. Also no surprise there, considering my age and total lack of literary training. But it gained a bit of a following among my classmates, who kept asking for more. Hence, it became a serial. All long hand, on lined notebook paper. Good lord!

Much, much later, in the early 1990's, I took the basic story from that old chestnut and fashioned a Gothic Romance out of it for Berkeley Publishing's Diamond imprint. It got a couple of decent reviews, but didn't sell well and, no, I'm not going to reveal the title it was published under. :-) I will always appreciate the kind reviews but, honestly, it was a corny, silly little thing and I'm relieved that it's been out of print for a decade.

Of all time? This type of question is so hard to answer. But I'll give it a go. They are not in any particular order:

1.) The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe
2.) The Masks of God Series, by Joseph Campbell
3.) Beloved, by Toni Morrison
4.) Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice
5.) Disappearances, by Frank Mosher