My mom was 19-years old when she had me, and knew very little about babies. She read that it was important to talk to your baby, except she didn't know what she should say, so she settled on reading me The New York Times every morning.
Growing up, we lived for a short period in San Francisco. One of my first memories was seeing the backdoor off it's hinges; we'd been robbed. Her roommate's TV was stolen, and it wasn't replaced until my mom got a boyfriend that moved in with one. Being an only child without electronic entertainment, I was resourceful and creative. I played for hours by myself with stuffed animals, but mostly I read. Frequently, I would look over recipes in my mom's Good Housekeeping Cookbook while she cooked dinner, which was a kind of excellent torture.
I worked my way through books about horses, starting with the gorgeously illustrated Billy and Blaze stories by C.W. Anderson, and then Misty of Chincoteague, which I didn't care for as much - and the entire Walter Farley series of books, beginning with the his first story written in the 1940's, The Black Stallion. I loved comics: Archie, Richie Rich and Mad Magazine. I read pre-teen fiction: anything written by Judy Blume, and VC Andrew's Flowers in the Attic series. As I got older, I read nearly everything written by Stephen King, although my favorite was a book of short stories called Different Seasons. Three of the four short stories became screenplays, and two of those are among my all-time favorite movies: Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption.
At 11-years old, I would play handball against the side of the stairwell at our apartment for hours. It was meditative; I'd settle into a rhythm with hitting the ball ka-chung ka-chung ka-chung and I would think of elaborate stories about horses. I wrote my first short story over several days on a yellow, legal-sized pad of paper about a pony and rider that got caught in a high tide along the bluffs of the beach.
When I was 15-years old, I was assigned to write a descriptive essay about a locker for an English class. Our teacher read it out loud to the class, and after he finished one of the popular boys remarked, "Someone in this class wrote that?" Our teacher indicated it was me, and I was both embarrassed and thrilled at the same time. Ever since that brief moment of validation - that my writing reached someone and meant something, I have wanted to become a writer.
