When I got out of school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to be an artist and I went to this newspaper and I gave them my sheet with all my stuff on it and they miss understood what I was doing and the woman came out and said, “Would you like a job as a reporter?” And it wasn’t a real job, it was to get $15.00 to go out and sit through a town council kind of meeting and then report on it. And I tell you at that point I was, you know, I didn’t know what to do.
And I was like, yeah I’ll give it a try and after that one meeting I knew I had found something that was going to be a big part of our life. So after that I was a report for like 15 years and I covered all kinds of stories, interviewed, oh my gosh, interviewed everybody from like country music people to backyard wrestlers. And actually the backyard wrestler was a lot more interesting than the country music star. He was awesome.
And I got to do all these amazing stories and meet all these great people. And then one day there was this story about this sewage treatment plant and they were doing a big — all this stuff down at the sewage treatment plant and I was going to make a phone call and my editor was like, “I think you need to go down to the sewage treatment plant.”
And so I went, I went to the sewage treatment plant and the guy down there, he doesn’t even realize, I don’t think that it smells bad there. He’s been working there for so long. So he gave me a two hour tour of the sewage treatment plant. Two hours walking around that place. And what a lot of people don’t realize is there are different smell zones within a sewage treatment plant. Different parts of it smell differently.
So I came out of there and I, I went to my desk, I wrote what I thought was a fantastic story. I mean, I wrote the beginning of the story and I thought it was fantastic. It was best thing I had ever written. And I showed it to my editor and he wrote — he sat back and he said, “Are you kidding?” So I had to rewrite the story and make it boring and less information about what it smelled like and what it looked like there.
But I kept that little bit that I had written about, what it was like at the sewage treatment plant and one day I realized — oh now I know who, who this belongs to. This is a book for kids to read. And so I kept all that and that became the first book that I ever got published. The Quick Pick of Adventure Society, about a trip to a sewage treatment plant. And instead of putting in less information about what I smelled like, I wrote more information about what it smelled like and I even wrote poems about what it smelled like and I — and I filled this book with the smells and the sights of the sewage treatment plant and that was the first book that came out for kids and actually we’re going to reprint it soon, so a new generation of kids can find out what it’s like in a sewage treatment plant.