Jake Mitchell

I had become so obsessed with Brian De Palma's Mission Impossible film that I decided to write my own spy caper. I called it "The U.C. Spys", the U.C. standing for "undercover". I was obviously extremely creative.

I want to say this was 2nd grade, so I'd probably written things before this, and I'd definitely crafted intricate storylines with army men and Bionicles, but "U.C. Spys" was the first time I took 20 sheets of paper, folded them together and stapled them to create a spine, and wrote a book.

It had two sequels. I was fascinated with the way trilogies, like Star Wars, used different colors for the marketing of each entry, and "U.C." followed that trend. #1 was blue, #2 was red, #3 was green.