When and how did you start writing? Did you just sit down one day and decide to try it or was it a slow development? How come you write fantasy?
In elementary school, I wasn’t much of a reader. In the third grade I fell in love with the Three Investigators books created by Robert Arthur, and I enjoyed them much more than the “meaningful” (boring) books people tried to get me to read for the next five years. So after that I hardly read anything until the eighth grade, when I had an English teacher who told me I couldn’t do a report on a Three Investigators book and instead pointed me toward Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly.
That book changed my life. When I first read it, I was amazed—I had no idea books like that existed. It engaged my imagination like no other book ever had, and it even helped me understand my own mother better, because the main character’s conflicts gave me a perspective on what my mother went through when she chose to focus on her family rather than her career. The book was creative, it was fun, yet it helped me understand life. At that point I started reading every fantasy book I could get my hands on, including Robert Jordan’s first Wheel of Time book, The Eye of the World , when it came out in paperback. I was hooked, and as I read more and more books, my grades went up in school—I went from a low-end average student to someone who got top grades.
It didn’t take reading many fantasy books before I decided writing them was what I wanted to do with my life. I started my first book when I was fifteen. It was horrible, but I just kept writing and writing until I actually got any good. I’ve been a writer full-time since 2004, but it would never have happened if not for Mrs. Reader handing me Dragonsbane .
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