In elementary school, while my friends mostly wanted to go outside and ride bikes at 90 mph, explore snake-infested creeks, and dangle from the monkey bars, I was writing plays and assigning them roles they had to play. (Lucky them!) I was also one of those kids who was reading books all the time, everything I could get my hands on. Luckily my mother loved reading fiction, and she had a LOT of books around and let me read anything I wanted. Naturally I read things I probably shouldn’t have read at a very early age, but all of them just whetted my appetite for writing my own stories.

  Books