Stan Morris

I was born in the Los Angeles basin and I lived there until I was thirteen. This influenced my writing in several ways. It was a very conservative area, and I still have conservative views on some aspects of life. It was a multi-ethnic area, and this would prove to be an big influence later in life. And it was a place where a boy with a skateboard or a bike could travel a long way, due to the flatness of the basin. Independence came early to me, and this has also influenced my writing. My characters tend to be family oriented, but also very independent.
When I was thirteen, my family moved to northern California, west of the San Francisco Bay area. This was a much more liberal area, and it was where I became interested in the Civil Rights movement, and where I came of age during the Vietnam War. My independent nature thrived in this environment, and during my senior year in high school, I sometimes skipped school and rode the BART system to spend the day in Berkeley or in San Francisco.

I must have been fourteen when I did my first serious writing. Serious for a fourteen year old boy, I mean. There was a new, cool TV show called Star Trek, and my first novel was a scifi that featured public teleportation booths that allowed people to travel between Earth and Mars. Zane Grey was a big influence for me, so my second novel was a western. Both books featured scantily clad girls in desperate need of a hero. Smith-Coronas had not been invented in those days and typewriters were very expensive, so I wrote those books in longhand cursive. The books have since been lost to posterity, much to the irritation of my wife and the private gratitude of me.