When I found out that Mercedes Lackey was going to have a book in Booktopia, I got so excited I started bouncing in my seat.

And we were on a car trip back from Illinois. You should have seen the looks my husband and kid gave me. If they didn't already think I was crazy, that would have done it.

My kid, in the long run, thought it was cute and told me, "It's funny seeing you fangirl over somebody."

Sigh. You gotta love it when your eighteen-year-old refers to you as 'cute'.

I went on to explain to this kid how heavily Lackey's writing has influenced me, both in terms of world-building and giving me a love for fantasy and strong women in fiction and in terms of who'd I grow to be as a person.

She planted seeds in me at a young age, on tolerance and love and acceptance and it's taken me years to understand just how deeply those seeds were planted and how much they affected me.

Authors, through their writing, can do amazing things-Mercedes Lackey is proof of that.

As I've been working on my book, I've been building the backstory that goes along with Ivy's heritage and her people and while in some ways, I pull from common mythology, I'm also weaving my own and Ivy's an animal lover. As I write more, I learn more and her love of animals goes deeper than just liking them--they're drawn to her and that ties into her heritage.

She likes to adopt rescue animals and currently has two pet cockatiels that she got from a bird rescue group. For the past days, I've been working on an illustration that I might either put in the book or use as a vellum insert.

I'm not sure just yet, but you can check out my illustration of geeky love below. Note: I didn't draw any of the images. I used hand-drawn illustrations through Canva and designed the layout, but that's all the credit I can claim.

Backers, you get to read an excerpt and meet Ivy's babies.