(Artist's rendering)

Susannah MullerProfessional nerd

Favorite Books (in very particular order)

1.The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley2.The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

3.The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut

“There are ignorant priests and ignorant people, who are all too ready to cry sorcery if a woman is

only a little wiser than they are!”

― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

The Mists of Avalon, or Why Susannah Just Starts Crying Sometimes for No Apparent

Reason

I get a lump in my throat whenever I think of this book. I read it about a year ago, and still every chapter of it haunts me. I was going through a rough time in my life when I bought it from the used book store up the street from my apartment, and for a month, each day at the job I despised, I would read it, all of it, completely absorbed in Bradley's masterful retelling of the Arthurian legends. I had always been a nerd about those legends, but felt marginalized. I was forever doomed to be a Morgana or a Guinevere, either evil or in love. Bradley changed that for me. These characters became three-dimensional, and the focus of the story. I even found myself weeping for Arthur and the other men in the book, who were previously just archetypes in my mind.

This book is also responsible for leading me to write fantasy fiction. This discovery brought me out of a low point of my life; when I write, everything is better.

Her queendom is located in uptown Kingston.

Her loyal subjects are allowed to play video games,

occasionally hold hands, and are sometimes permitted

to go outside.Any dissent is punishable by death,

which the Queen of All Things believes can be

accomplished by falling asleep

on someone.

The Muller/Pyne family is subject to the rule of Misty, Queen of All Things

Other Literary Interests One summer I read almost exclusively Michael Crichton

books. I've tried twice to read Gravity's Rainbow, but then I got

distracted, probably by television. The fourth runner-up on my favorite book lists is Parable of

the Sower by Octavia Butler, which has also had a major influence on my own work.

I enjoy the poetry of Anne Sexton. I actually really do like Shakespeare, and I wish I could tell

that to my high school self as she groans through Julius Caesar. I would plead with her, “Just wait, there are much better ones to read.”

I self-published a fantasy novella, and I'm working on the sequel now.