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How did you come across your favorite author(s)? Recommended by a friend? Stumbled across at a bookstore? A book given to you as a gift?
Was it love at first sight? Or did the love affair evolve over a long acquaintance?

My favorite authors of the moment, subject to change as fast as my reading list does, are Jacqueline Carey, Laurie R. King, and Ellen Kushner.

Nonny Morgan introduced me to Jacqueline Carey when she sent me her copy of Kushiel's Dart. It was definitely a matter of love at first sight. I inhaled Dart and immediately ran out and bought the sequels. Carey was the first author since I started writing who I was able to read without being distracted by my internal editor. The beauty of her story left me awestruck.

Laurie R. King I discovered by happy accident. I had heard tell of a Sherlock Holmes novel that gave him a young female apprentice, and told it as her story. One of my first memories of reading is lying in bed at night, alternating reading chapters of The Hound of the Baskervilles with my dad, so I've always had a love for Holmes. Twisting the stories so that they had a female protagonist enthralled me. I ran over to my high school library, snatched The Beekeeper's Apprentice out of another student's hands, and was hooked on the first line. (The protagonist is a girl after my own heart -- she reads while she walks!)

This was a slower love affair. I really enjoyed The Beekeeper's Apprentice, and waited impatiently for the next book in the series. Each one that I read made me fall more and more in love with her.

Ellen Kushner is the most recent addition to my favorites list. My good friend Terra read Swordspoint a few months ago, loved it, and was so certain that I would love it that she informed me she was getting it for me for Christmas. She was absolutely right -- I adored it, as well as the "sequel", The Privilege of the Sword. I am now impatiently eagerly awaiting my copy of the third book set in that world, The Fall of the Kings, and if Terra's reaction to it is anything to judge by (which it usually is), this one is going to be even better.