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The library has
always been a place for me
to escape, and a place that
I could just disappear into another world.
It was just the first place in my memories,
as far back is I can remember,
that I had some place I could go
that I could just relax and be me,
and not worry about anything,
disappear into that other world. That, to me, fostered my love of reading.
My favorite librarian,
back then her name was Robbie Doss,
and she was my
librarian at
Mendenhall Elementary School in Plano.
And I still see her. In fact she came to my book launch when I sold to
Penguin/Putnam
and I released "Trial by Fire"
as Joe Davis.
And she was one of the first people I invited and she was thrilled to be
there
and I was thrilled to have her there, because she's one of the people who,
back in my childhood memories, fostered that love of reading. She came to our
classroom and read books to us
once or twice a week.
She came to all the grade levels
and she always had a stack of books to tell us about
and to read to us.
She is one of the people who,
if I can name one librarian
from way back,
it was Robbie Doss.
I still go to the library today.
I did growing up. My mother and I went to the library all the time.
And then as I got older,
you know, I still continued going to the library.
Plano libraries, I'm from the Dallas area and so
I would go to the library,
go there for research, too,
and find lots of good research books
and things like that, as I got older and into high school.
And still to this day, I still have my library card
and I still go. I go and I pick over the good books and
sometimes put one on hold that I really want to read.
[On library budget cuts] In my area
I haven't seen so much
in the way of budget cuts yet,
in our area,
but I'd hate to see any program
like libraries lose any money to do what they do,
to get the community to read.
I think reading is so important.
I think there are a lot of things we could probably cut first before we cut
libraries.
Does the median in the city really needs flowers and trees? You know we
could probably cut that before we cut books from the library.
So I'm very passionate about it. Let's don't cut books.
There are other things that we can cut
that beautify the city,
that are really just extraneous things we don't need. We do need libraries and
we do need books, and so
that, to me, would be the last resort.
[On censorship] I do not believe in censorship
at all in libraries.
I don't believe...
My mom... my parents,
from the time I started reading, and I started reading young,
my parents never censored my fiction material.
I was reading adult books in the seventh grade.
My best friend is the same way.
My best friend of almost forty years, she and I, our parents never censored
what we read.
She read "Gone with the Wind" in third grade
and understood it.
I just don't believe in censorship.
I think that
it's such an intellectual thing,
that anyone who can read books that are above grade level
really has the intelligence to understand books.
It's just, to me, don't hold someone
back from their choices.
I still live in America, right?
I really don't
believe in someone governing what I can and cannot look at.
Right now, I'm writing the
Alpha Pack series. It's paranormal romance and
it's sort of edgy and it's a little bit darker than my Joe Davis stuff.
It's a series about a team of Navy Seals who are turned into
wolf-shifters and then we have other shifters that come into the series, too,
so we're not going to limit ourselves, but
they're former Navy Seals.
Their mission is
top-secret black ops and they can be dispatched anywhere in the world at a
moment's notice to take care of any paranormal threat that might arise.
And they go as a team. They go in there and
if they need to take a prisoner to find out information, they have a cell block
on their compound where they would take this
Sometimes they might have to destroy them, but they're very heroic
they are very "save the world" kind of guys.
Navy Seals wolf shifters, right?
How can you go wrong?