Childhood Memory Monday: Unicorns

I named this blog The Enchanted Unicorn for several reasons. The first is that it is the name of my favorite slot machine. Once while living in Tucson I started with $20 and ended up with over $200, playing penny slots, no less. Another time in Phoenix I started with something like $100 and ended up with over $600 (4 rows of lions, rawr!) playing nickel slots. The rows are all princes, and princesses, and unicorns, and roses, and the bonus game consists of treasure chests guarded by evil sorcerers. I love it!

But my love of unicorns goes back much farther than that. When I was young, I was completely obsessed with them. When we lived in Vermont (up until I was 5 or so) I wanted to be a unicorn so badly my dad made little paper cones shaped like unicorn horns and taped them to the bright orange hunter's caps he made us wear (we lived in an area so rural there truly was the off chance that we'd be shot in the autumn and winter if we weren't wearing a bright color, and my sister and I loved loved loved our caps - we felt so grown up!). We galloped all over the mountain we lived on, our delightful whinnies filling the crisp fall air.

Later, mostly when we lived in Massachussetts from when I was 6-9 or so, I also had an imaginary unicorn in the way that some children have imaginary friends. Every year that we lived in MA we drove down to Florida (yes, drove, it took 3 days because my dad wouldn't let my mom take a turn driving) and I stared out the window, imagining that my unicorn ran swiftly beside the car. Periodically, I would tell my dad that my unicorn was tired and we needed to pull into a rest area. Typically, that meant that I was bored, stiff from sitting, or had to pee :-)

During our time in Massachussetts, my sister and I also shared an obsession with the animated classic, The Last Unicorn. Every weekend my dad would take us to the video store and ask us what we wanted to rent, and every week it was the same. He tried in vain to get us to widen our selection, but The Last Unicorn on a weekly basis for months at a stretch was not unusual. I remember that my dad cried almost every time...whether from boredom or because it's such a heartbreakingly beautiful film, who can say? I still own both the book the movie was based on and the DVD. Though I think to call Mia Farrow's singing a "voice talent" is overstating things a tad (it also features the "voice talents" of Angela Lansbury and Jeff Bridges).

I read every book that had to do with unicorns that I could get my hands on. This was back in the days when Choose Your Own Adventure books were hot, and of course my favorite one was called The Magic of the Unicorn. Those books must be collector's items now because a new copy on Amazon runs over $75, can you believe it? I also remember a time that we were walking around an open-air flea market and I came across De Historia et Veritate de Unicornis: On The History and Truth of the Unicorn. A brand new copy of this sucker goes for over $160 on Amazon. The book is made up of copies of an illuminated Latin manuscript accompanied by translations and the author's notes - the manuscript being purportedly held in trust by monks and passed on to this worthy author, who begins to walk the boundary between our world and the unicorn's over the course of the translation.

The book ends with the monk entrusting the author with an actual unicorn horn, which is buried in a secret location that can only be revealed by cracking the riddle in poem form that is reprinted on the last page of the book. Of course I immediately committed the poem to memory, convinced that I and I alone was destined to uncover the horn, wield whatever mystical power it commanded, including drawing the few remaining unicorns in our world to me by virtue of its power. I still remember some of it:

and I shall guard the source of greatness
waiting by a teardrop, from neither joy nor sorrow born
in silver bound, beneath the ground
I am the spiral horn

Like my friend Dalyn, who believed in Santa Claus for an obscenely long time, I was CONVINCED that unicorns were real right up until I was in high school. And hey, so far my belief in unicorns has led to a profit of about $700, so who's to say it isn't so?

Books & Blogs Friday: My New Favorite, Robin Hobb

So I have a new favorite fantasy author - her name is Robin Hobb. In order to explain why I think she is so awesome, though, you should probably know a little bit about the way I read and the type of books I prefer.

I love loooong books. 500 pages or so is a minimum for something I feel like I could really get into. Bonus points if it's part of a series. I read so quickly (I have read over 1000 pages in a day before - once it was Stephen King's It, probably one of my top 5 books ever, and once it was Swan Song by Robert McCammon - each of them is about 1100 pages or so) that in order to feel that I have any time to immerse myself in the universe of the story at all, it needs to be quite lengthy.

This is a huge reason why I adore Stephen King, and many of my other favorite authors - Sara Douglass, Robert Jordan, Melanie Rawn - also write lots of really long novels (King doesn't do many series, but I forgive him because he is fantastic). I have been getting frustrated with Sara Douglass lately because the first two books in each of her series tend to be very good, and then the last book or two tend to blow goats. Nothing like getting all invested and then having the story become practically unreadable on you.

I've also been angry with Melanie Rawn for awhile because she started this awesome series called The Mageborn Traitors, and then only wrote the first two books in the trilogy (and it is VERY OBVIOUS at the end of the second book that another is required). Yes, yes, she suffered a meltdown from clinical depression while writing the second book in the series, and is afraid that if she writes the third that she'll go back to that place. I understand I'm supposed to be sympathetic. But all I can think is WRITE THE BOOK, DAMMIT!

So the beautiful thing about Robin Hobb is that she has 4 complete trilogies and another trilogy with the first two written. All of which are long enough to fit in my minimum page length for a novel. Hooray! Then I found out yesterday that she has also written ten novels under a pseudonym, Megan Lindholm. Double yay!

I do not like reading nonfiction of any kind, or most "literary" fiction. So anything recommended by Oprah's book club is probably not up my alley. These days, I prefer fantasy and science fiction exclusively. I used to force myself to read literary fiction, and since I have a BA and an MA in creative writing, I can appreciate it on a technical level, but I realized at some point, the time I have to do the things that I want to do is so limited that I shouldn't feel bad about saying no.

C on the other hand, is more on the sci fi side of things, and he also prefers shorter books (a lot shorter, maybe half the length that I like) and will even read short stories, which I have ZERO interest in at all. I have discovered that our friend Logan has identical taste in books to me (previously, the only such person I've located is Dalyn) and he has a lot of books that I've never read, which is awesome. He also has, not identical, but very compatible TV taste as me, which is another post entirely :-)