Well, I like to tell kids that it never occurred to me in a million years that I’d be an author when I grew up. We never met authors in those olden days; we never even studied authors in school. It was you got a book, you loved a book and you didn’t associate it with the creator.
I don’t think I really knew that writing was my calling, but I knew that I loved living in my imagination. I spent all my childhood in a state of make-believe. I mean, I couldn’t cross the room without thinking that I was in a movie or I was a cowboy or I was in an alternate reality.
I think because I grew up on Army posts, my brothers and my sister and I were each other’s best friends. We moved every year and we just sort of reinvented ourselves constantly; and that was usually through the imagination. I think in that way, I was always an author. I would often speak my stories out loud. I would just talk to myself endlessly, but I would usually be one of the players in this story.
I think that those were the signs; and also I was a big reader. All the kids in my family were big readers. My mom had been a second grade teacher before she married and she made sure we could all read. She’d sit on the couch with us and read with us every day. If there was a weak reader, that one would read with her more.
We were really good readers and we always went to the library, piled up on books. I think that was the reading and the make believe led to my being an author.
