I’ve invited Jill Williamson, author of By Darkness Hid (Marcher Lord Press, April 2009) to become a regular here at Spec Faith. For now she’s agreed to contribute several guest blog posts. Her first one will acquaint you with her a little more.

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Hi. I’m Jill. My family moved to rural Alaska when I was five. We went from house to house those first few years. My dad was a carpenter and he’d get free rent as long as he was fixing up the places. When I was nine, Dad bought his own land. Our first house was a combination of a turquoise bullet trailer and what Dad called “the hooch,” which was an almost see-through addition to the trailer made from a spindly pine tree frame that was covered in Visqueen—the stuff construction workers use to hold insulation in walls. Dad took more sappy pine trees and built a triple bunk bed in the hooch. Being the oldest, I got the top bunk. I’d stay up until the middle of the night reading under that never-darkening Alaskan summer sky. I usually woke up from mosquitoes buzzing around my head or a twitching dragonfly that had somehow managed to get trapped between the Visqueen layers of the ceiling three feet from my face.

We didn’t have electricity. Town was twenty-five miles away. So when I ran out of library books, I daydreamed. I came up with all kinds of characters, most of which had electricity and running water and didn’t have to use the two-seater outhouse my dad was so proud of. (“You don’t have to wait,” he’d said when he first unveiled it to mom and us kids.) So that’s where I came from.

I’ve always love reading, especially teen fantasy. When the first Harry Potter movie came out, a huge debate started in our church as to whether or not the books were evil. I decided to write a book Christians wouldn’t complain about. (I know. Naïve, huh?) But once I started writing that novel I was hooked. I’ve been writing ever since.

Some of my all-time favorites? The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia, Harry Potter, Blink, This Present Darkness, anything Randy Ingermanson wrote, LOTR, Timeline, the Narnia books, Ender’s Game, and The Giver.

Thanks for letting me be a part of Speculative Faith.