I decided to research the subject. I went to my favorite book about famous people: The Guiness Book of World Records. If I could break one of those, then everyone would want to get to know me, right? Well, my dad’s only 5'6½" and my mother’s even shorter, so I’d never be the tallest person in the world like Robert Ludlow who was less than half-an-inch shy of nine feet tall. That’s three feet taller the your standard, use-around-the-house ladder. I couldn’t stand on one foot for even a minute (bad balance), so there was no way I was doing that for days and days. Then I found out that there was a six-year-old named Dorothy Straight who had published a novel. I thought, “She did that at six? I’m already eight. I’m behind. I better get started.”

I read all I could about being an author, which I think was one book. That’s all they had in my school library and we didn’t have the Internet yet—I know, I know, I lived among the dinosaurs, didn’t I? That book said, “You should write what you know.” I thought, what do I know, I’m eight? I wrote about my experience of having surgery to lengthen one of my legs, but I forgot to clean my room and my mom threw it out with all the other things I left around my room. That’ll teach a body to keep things clean and tidy.

Then I thought, why should I write what I know? I know it already, writing about it would be boring, so I decided to write about what I wanted to know. Back then, I wanted to know what it would be like to be a boy, investigate a haunted house, or survive the Vietnam War. All these ideas kept me writing. By the time I reached sixth grade, I’d gotten pretty good at writing make-believe stories. A teacher would ask me to write a five-page story by the end of the week and I’d be twenty pages into it by Thursday night and have to come up with a rush-rush ending to turn it in the next morning. I loved writing stories.