The reason I write is because I read. I began reading in first grade. My mother likes to tell the story of how worried she was that I rejected all her attempts to teach me to read and insisted I’d learn that in first grade. Once I entered first grade and deigned to learn to read? She could not get my nose out of a book. I recall the days when she would send me out of the house to “play in the fresh air” — with a warning to all the neighbors not to let me in their houses to read (I’m still not an outdoors kind of girl). One kind neighbor would hand me books out of her sliding glass door and I would sit outside and…read.

I — very literally — read everything I could get my hands on for decades. When I was thirteen I was huge into the Trixie Belden series, and read every Harlequin Romance in my local library. I also read a copy of Jaws my uncle had left lying around his house, and the science fiction apocalyptic classics The Sheep Look Up and On the Beach.

In my AP classes, I was the only one in my class who liked Silas Marner (technically, was moved by, because like is…just wrong when you talk about that book). I had three younger sisters, and I read all their books, too. And the backs of cereal boxes. And the newspaper my parents subscribed to. And the Bible. And Bullfinch’s Mythology. And the National Geographics that came to the house every month. And the encyclopedia. Even the dictionary (we had the coolest dictionary ever, that must have weighed at least twenty pounds and was probably ten inches thick). I used to believe our gigantic dictionary contained every word ever known, but I’ve since come to understand how everchanging the English language is and how impossible that might be…except, perhaps for dictionary.com.

Because of my love affair with books as both a reader and a writer, I believe there is one immutable in the publishing business: to tell a good story that makes readers feel they’ve actually met the characters and gone on the adventures with them. I’ve “gone” so many places and “seen” so many things that I would never have experienced in my relatively adventure-free life if it were not for books. I don’t see a change in that part of the business from the day I sent out my first short story, until now. That part of the business isn’t affected by new technologies. Readers still want a good read. That hasn’t changed in me, either. I just finished Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. It was my reward for catching up on all my work. I still wish I could write like that. Maybe one day….

Next up — What I Hope Never Changes In Me, the Writer