At that time I was sharing a room with my older sister, and I ran to my older sister’s part of the room, and I hid the book under the bed. So the first adult book that I remember reading is Stephen King’s The Shining, and I was seven when I started reading it, and I got so scared at the part when Danny was going into room 237. My first book wasn’t specifically romance. I would just take whatever I could find from my parents’ library… dictionaries… books that were well beyond what I should be reading. I started reading… but once I started reading… it was like, okay, I would have children’s books. Five-year-old me like ‘what’s happening?’. She actually started a bit before me, and I was like, ‘Oh no, I have to step it up’. And when I was learning to read, she was two. You know I was learning to read in kindergarten and I have a sister who is three years younger than me. But my first romances – I started reading my parents’ books pretty early. I always have kind of loved stories and storytelling and stories with romantic elements. We moved several times, and they got lost in the move, but she’s always talking about how she is sad that she wasn’t able to preserve my earliest writing. She said I used to have a journal that I would have to write in that was drawing pictures and write random things before I went to bed every night. And this is my mom’s story, which is that I have been a writer since before I could write. I loved watching movies with romantic things. My other family members who live with us or who visited us or we visited would read with me. I guess I’ve always loved stories when I learned how to read. For as long as I can remember, I have always loved reading. And you don’t know if it’s, like, true or it’s, like, you know, that the mom is embellishing. What’s your story?ĪC: And so part of my story is, like, you know, what your parents tell you from the time before you can really remember. I want to talk about when you first started reading romance. JMF: So I want to go all the way back to the beginning. Julie Moody-Freeman: I am so happy to have Alyssa Cole with me. This conversation with Alyssa Cole originally appeared Septemon the Black Romance Podcast, created and hosted by Julie E.

Let It Shine by Alyssa Cole