What are your five favorite books, and why?
Books played a major part in my childhood. I was a loner with few friends. I was not a sports fan, so my heroes were fictitious characters. The books I read taught me many of the virtues I still carry with me. While some kids looked up to and emulated the sports figure of the week, I looked up to and emulated the likes of Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings, Travis from Old Yeller, and Menion Leah (from The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks.) I was a library rat. Some of my favorite books when I was a child were Old Yeller by Fred Gibson, Snow Dog by Kjelgaard, White Fang by London, everything Tolkien and The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. Those are still my five favorite books!
Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?
I remember it well! I knew I wanted to be a writer after I read Jim Kjelgaard's Big Red, the story of a boy and his dog and how they hunted down a killer bear. I was so smitten with that book that the first story I ever wrote (for my fifth grade English teacher, Ms. Budzinski) was titled, "Old Majesty.” Old Majesty was the bear in Big Red, so I guess you could say there was a wee bit of plagiarism involved. But I was only 11, and I did get an A. After that I read The Hobbit and knew I wanted to write fantasy.
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