This was the early 90s just outside of Providence, Rhode Island after all the mob was everywhere. The windows beside the bed were always open to catch the breeze but Pawtucket wasn't a safe place. The heat of the summer sat heavy in that apartment. I'd drift off thinking about right and wrong, how good guys always win, the stories at my lips the awakenings of a queer child just discovering the hero's journey and the ideas of right and wrong that would come to later define my life as a writer.

I'd imagine myself as a detective, solving crimes, kissing the girl at the end in dramatic old Hollywood style. It was hot in the small space I was sweaty with the lack of air conditioner and my mind racing. I lay in the dark, looking up at the springs of the mattress above me.

It was around this age – eight or nine – that I started to tell myself stories to help me fall asleep. I wanted to be tucked away into a small place where I could feel safe and could control my environment. I'd go to sleep, lying not on my bed, but on the floor beneath it. But it was the crime shows that I gravitated toward, the ones that aired later at night, the stories that would seed my later love of crime dramas.Īs a child, I never slept well. I grew up watching a lot of the same television my mother did as a child: Scooby Doo, Bewitched, and I Dream of Jeannie. We'd watch Nick until the channel switched to Nick at Nite, and then, sometimes, we'd watch some of the old shows they played too. The fart jokes were funny and it wasn't the 'auto racing' our dad was obsessed with. We were too young to understand what was going on in those shows. My sister and I watched a lot of the Nickelodeon fare - shows aimed at teenagers in the mid-90s that we look back on now with disgust. When my parents divorced, my dad got cable, and I got a crash course in mid-90s pop culture education. She wanted her children to be readers as she never was, growing up in the 1960s as a latch-key kid, watching hours of television before her parents arrived home. She doesn't believe in bumper stickers either, but if she did, I'm sure she'd have one that said kill-your-television. How Sailor Moon played an important role during my childhood

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