I read a lot of different things, whatever catches my interest. My first books for fun reading (as opposed to school) were Lords of Atlantis by Wallace West, the Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and The Demu Trilogy by F. M. Busby. I was hooked on Sci-Fi/Fantasy from there on!
While I have always had a couple of original characters in my head, and made up great fantasy stories to put myself to sleep, I didn't learn how to write stories until much later in life. Around the fifth season of X-Files, actually. I discovered fan fiction, spent the summer reading nothing else, and decided I could do better than a lot of the stuff I was reading. After my first three pages, I thought I gave birth to a full grown cow! A year later, a 3000 page X-Files series was no sweat. I got several online fan awards for it.
Stargate was next. I used many original characters in that one, experimenting with them, and received a lot of fan emails about them.
My first e-book is now available.