The Compulsory About Me Page

My name is Sarah, but I've always regretted that. You see, Sarah is a very plain name and, around the time I was born, ridiculously common. In High School my graduating class had 13 Sarahs (and Saras). In fact, some of my best friends were also named Sarah. We called ourselves Los Tres Sarahs and we "fought crime on the side". We also gave out coconuts to unsuspecting freshmen for no particular reason other than to weird them out.

After becoming an adult (physically, at least) I fought against my common name by inflicting my 5 children with their own unique names, each of which I would have killed for growing up. And because I am an insufferable geek, each of their names comes from a favorite book of my husband and I. There's Luthien Tinuviel and Maedhros James after a couple of Elves from Tolkien's The Silmarillion. (Not the James part, obviously. That was just a bit of mercy earned for our son by my husband. I would have gone with something different.) Then came Fiona Rose and Corwin Benedict. Fiona, Corwin and Benedict are all names of members of the royal family in Roger Zelazny's Amber books. And last we have Severian Wolfe who is named after the main character (Severian) and the author (Gene Wolfe) of The Book of the New Sun.

I'm proud of my kids.

My world revolves around my family. I will always be a devoted wife and mother first and foremost.
My other great passion is for fantasy stories.

It began the day I picked up The Hobbit from the local library. By the time I had put down the final volume of The Lord of the Rings, my life had changed forever. My love for Tolkien's stories set me on the path that would allow me to meet my future husband, another rabid Tolkien fan, as well as giving me a strong desire to tell stories of my own in the same tradition as Tolkien. At first it was a personal thing and I didn't intend to even try to have my stories published. However, with the rise of the digital revolution and the self publishing boom, I've changed my mind on that. I now intend to write my stories to be read by others and to self publish them. I'm not going after fame or fortune. I just want to share the stories of my heart with the world in the hopes that they might do some good for future readers as Tolkien's works did for me.

I'll be talking a lot about fantasy stories here on this blog, both my own and those that I read. Anime that I enjoy will probably be a pretty common theme, because almost without exception I find the best stories being told today in anime (and the manga/light novels anime is often adapted from, but I generally stick to the visual medium). Tolkien will no doubt crop up here, there and everywhere. What can I say? The man was a genius and I wish I was half as gifted. There may be the occasional mention of my gaming hobby. My husband and I play the MMORPG Guild Wars 2 together (at a monthly cost of $0 it's a great activity for parents of too many kids with too little money to take up) and I also take part in some creative activities in The Lord of the Rings Online. (You might know me there as Fionnuala.)

But more than anything it will be about myth-making. I'm on a journey of sub-creation as I seek to create a complex, deep and believable fantasy world and I'm falling head over heels into Mythopoesis.

Want to contact me? Send me an email here: writersarahmccabe@gmail.com