Ok, so a bit more about me

I’ve been told this is a story that needs to be shared, so, here goes! *takes a deep breath*

I was born in 1992 in a little town called Turda, in Romania. For those of you who don’t know, that falls within the Transylvania “province” so to speak of my country – which, everyone knows is where Dracula lived Yes, the jokes never end lol!

My childhood is your usual tomboy story, until everything was thrown upside down when my parents announced their intention to move to Canada.

Don’t get me wrong, I was excited – what kid wouldn’t be? But it was a whole new world! They’d taught us English since kindergarden, I was learning French as of grade 5, but you guess where the parents decided to stay? Yup, Montreal.

We arrived in May. School was starting September. With nothing to do except read, and my parents busy with new jobs and settling us in, I did what any kid would: went to the library.

Now, the library where we lived was pretty damn nice. It was in the Mount-Royal neighbourhood, and it’s one of THE best libraries I’ve ever been to. Fully stocked. Now, before leaving I was in my Ancient Egypt phase – read everything I could get my hands on.

So this library, it had a bunch of novels (400+pgs) by Christian Jacq. Of course, I couldn’t read French – yet. My next step was to go to the kids’ section. I picked up some French books, this series on a turtle called Benjamin (Franklin for the English folk). And armed with a French-Romanian dictionary, I started reading.

Now, I was about 11 at this time. And my brain was like a sponge. But I have to say, I had my mom’s good genes for languages, cause I grasped the French fairly quickly. In 4 months – by the time school started in September – I had gotten to the Christian Jacq novels.

So, picture your average scrawny 11 yr old, lugging 400+ books around in grade 6. Not the best way to make friends, eh? You’d be surprised how many people asked me about the books. And how many of them were surprised I could read so much.

Needless to say. by the end of the school year, I had finished the entire collection, and moved on to something else. Looking back on it, it’s a time in my life where books helped me escape – and it wouldn’t be the last time. Perhaps that contributed a lot to my love for writing.