Why so dark?

I don't see any reason why steampunk and urban fantasy HAVE to be creepy or dark. There has to be more room for creativity than that. If it's icky and miserable, with no glimpse of goodness, it's not something I will enjoy reading. Or writing, for that matter.

All my stories tend to be rather dark at times, but the darkness isn't the point; it's only dark until the light bursts in and shatters the darkness with its radiance.

Forsythia flowers, time rifts, and... yellow Christmas stars?

It's December. Yep, that's a forsythia flower. Obviously there is a time rift somewhere in the area. Perhaps I should go tromping about, see if I can find it. If it manifests as a slash of glowing blue time energy it might easily be mistaken for Christmas decorations and ignored.

;)

Top Ten Tuesday: Childhood Favorites

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

It was hard limiting this to just ten. :P

1. Animorphs. I LOVED this series of books. It was the first "sci-fi" I'd ever read that wasn't intolerably stupid. (It was ridiculous, oh yes, but it was the fun kind, not the stupid kind!)

2. Wayside School Stories, by Louis Sachar. I think there were three books like this, and I loved all of them, especially the stories about the missing 19th story.

3. The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis. My favorite was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, especially the part where Eustace becomes a dragon, and is saved by Aslan.

4. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J. K. Rowling. This one was the only one I had. I was banned from reading Harry Potter at one point, which I obeyed for awhile, since I only had one book anyway, but it didn't last. I was never exactly the most blindly obedient child. . .

5. The Babysitters' Club. I read lots of these, and I liked how funny they often were.

6. Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was always on the lookout for more of these, I only had two of them and read them till they practically fell apart.

7. The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This was the first really long book (well, I thought it was long) that I read, and I still remember finishing it, sitting in my favorite pine tree. I SO wanted a secret garden of my own, so I went out in the woods and pretended I had one.

8. Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo.

9. The Magic Treehouse books. (These were when I was younger, most of the list has been coming from when I was 11 or so.)

10. My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George. I wanted to go out in the woods and make my own tree house, like the boy in the story did.