I have always had a fascination with the world of the supernatural and paranormal. As a child I loved reading ghost stories and watching TV documentaries.
Strange But True was one that I remember as a favourite, and one of the few that I was allowed to watch. My all-time favourite Hollywood films include Ghostbusters 1 and 2 and The Addams Family trilogy. When I was old enough I wasted no time in watching Hammer Horror classics and whatever horror films I could get my hands on!
My dissertation at university was about vampires in popular culture and their presence in society today.
Addicted to Fantasy Books
I have always been a bookworm. My early favourite stories were usually of the fairytale variety, adventure stories by Enid Blyton, and fantastical fictional feasts by Roald Dahl. As I grew older and began to discover the new world of Young Adult (as then uncategorised in popular fiction), I was excited to find that there were hundreds of books about vampires, werewolves, witches and other supernatural creatures. In my cultural circle these sorts of stories were very much relegated to childhood reading, and I was encouraged to ‘get real’ as I grew up.
What does it mean to “Get Real” anyway?
What does it mean to ‘get real’ anyway? The paranormal world is very much alive and thriving, even if people prefer to think of it as fiction or fantasy. The very fact that all of these stories exist makes them real. Fans of popular television series such as True Blood and The Vampire Diaries will agree that to them the characters and stories are also very real. It is simply an exaggerated form of reality, something that might happen in a parallel universe or alternate reality. And that is probably why I write paranormal stories. I love the freedom, the possibility, and yes, the romance, of the creatures and characters that come to me.
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SpookyMrsGreen 
It’s so good to hear you are writing about a subject that you’ve long been passionate about. For a writer this is a very creative position to be in. I too have long been interested in the paranormal; I think I come at it from a slightly different direction from you, but I have always been intrigued by true life ghost stories, by tales of the macabre, by stories of “the unexplained”, of “mystery and imagination”; I am interested in “the cusp”, that is, the point at which people in this material world confront the apparently “impossible” and have to come to terms with the unexplained. That fascinates me.
I can only echo the previous comment. I love hearing about real life hauntings – they remind me that reality is much bigger than we think – and writing fiction is a great way to explore the paranormal.
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