Howdy.

[NicholasFallon]

from my attempt to win a signed copy of TOM on Tor/Forge's blog contest in November:

 

"Growing up through elementary school I was a huge book worm – in 6th / 7th / 8th grade I read lots of young adult fiction from the paper-back racks in our school library. They never really lasted very long, usually a week at the most. This was a real bummer because I always wanted the story to go on forever. One summer day my parents came home from a yard sale and my Mom had a stack of extremely thick books she presented to me. She said it was the beginning of a series she thought I would enjoy. What she had brought home was EotW, small paper-back, tGH large paper-back, tDR, hard-cover, and tSR hard-cover. (plus, she got them all for like five bucks!) This was most likely in 1994 when I was in 7th grade. I remember this: my little sister and my Grandmother both had the same birthday in July, we usually celebrated it with a large family pick-nick at my Grandparent’s house… I vividly remember spending the whole day on one of those 3-section ratcheting lawn chairs covered in strands of vinyl tubing reading Eye of the World – I was engrossed. The best part was, after the fist book, there was a second… and a third… I’ve been reading them ever since. I remember one winter I spent all weekend in bed under a mountain of covers (corner room, up in VT = chilly) reading one of the books. I remember many late nights with the house completely still, propped up in bed, away on grand adventures with Rand and his friends. Sometimes I would re-read the last book just before a new one would come out, to keep up to speed. I went to a full-time one-year technical college in 2000 and began my first complete re-read with my spare time. I began my second complete re-read in September 2007. Sadly I have not been able to convert my wife who reads murder mystery type stuff… although I did read to her on the phone in while we were dating in college as well as during the 22 hour drive in a rented truck after graduation when moving all my worldly possessions from my home-town to hers."

 

and furthermore... I have all 13 books and New Spring in hardcover, almost all of them have been christmas gifts, other than the initial group from the yard sale. Also last month my wife got me the coffee table book / encyclopedia type deal "the world of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time" by RJ and Teresa Patterson... plan to dig into that after I finish TOM - bout halfway through there... I also had a hardcover Fallon Blood (hense the username) but I'm afraid it went missing and all I have left is the dust jacket... I'm only about 5 hours from atlanta but I've never been to a DragonCon but hope to go to a JordanCon sometime in the future... My alias on ew-too talkers was (is, but who goes on them anymore...) darkLord which I had decided was a mix between Rand and a Myrddraal (love the cloaks...) I thoroughly enjoy the books but do not study plots, etc... pretty much take it one page at a time at face value. I try not to look too hard at fan art because I don't want it to influence the images I've created in my head all these years... I have two WOT tattoos on my right calf, which I posted on a tattoo thread earlier this evening, which made me decide I should do the intro page... I don't really have a lot of time for these forums but I would like to get to know them a little better as I am able to... um... been married ten years in May, and I have four daughters ages 1.5 to 13, two biological and two adopted... I do most of my reading during the colder weather, when it's nice out I try to be outside in the garage or out on my bicycle... guess that's it ?