bookworm

I went to my first Superbowl (is that one word?) party yesterday. Randy and the boys have gone for several years but I'm not a sports fan so missed it till now. I still can't tell you who won although the food was wonderful, especially all that salmon dip - a northwest staple. The game just couldn't compete with the book I found on the coffee table. Some consider it the second most important historical book after the Bible. It's entitled Foxe's Book of Martyrs. If it sounds like dry reading, it isn't. The stories of the men and women within, all true, are a fiction writer's dream.

I kept coming across Scotsmen called "covenanters" who died for their faith. I have a penchant for anything Scottish. In The Frontiersman's Daughter I have a Scotsman that I fell in love with while writing. I know you're not supposed to fall in love with your protagonists but I do and guess it proves that they're really real to me. Nearly as real as Randy, anyway. Sometimes I feel I know them even better. Maybe because I dream them up. Scotsmen make very inspiring heroes as Foxe's Book of Martyrs proves. Think Mel Gibson and Braveheart. You get the idea. I recently read that over 1/3 of the Colonial population in America at the time of the Revolutionary War was Scottish!

Anyway, as the other game watchers sat cheering or booing and I sat reading, Randy finally leaned over and said to me, "You really are a bookworm." It's only taken him 25 years to figure this out. After Christian, I guess it's the label I like best.

bookworm (1599) 1: a person unusually devoted to reading and study 2: any of various insect larvae (as of a beetle) that feed on the binding and paste of books (Webster's)

I didn't know there were bugs that ate books! I much prefer the first definition. Hope there are no bookworms in your future. And you meet the first criteria:)