As a nerdy and socially incompetent child, I read scads of books. I always did pretty well with writing in school, but it never occurred to me to write for a living. By the time it did occur to me, I had already grown up and worked a slew of odd jobs: some wonderful, some rotten, all random. I started off at 16 as a skating carhop. Now I deliver pizza. In between I’ve waited tables, answered phones, washed dishes, wrangled small children, inserted circular newspaper ads, and sucked all kinds of unmentionable things out of people’s gaping mouths with a dental suction hose.
Somewhere along the way, I penciled in writing as my future twelfth career. It wasn’t much to go on, considering the wide range of potential writing gigs. So I played around with journalism, your hard news and your soft features. I learned how to operate a video camera and produce multimedia projects to complement my written words. I wrote for the school newspaper and for blogcritics.com. I titillated my inner geek with hour after hour of copy editing. And I wrote a children’s novel, what folks in the business call “middle grade.”
I fell in love with writing for children, with the educational potential of the Basic Bedtime Story. And I’ve been working toward that twelfth career ever since.
