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I think I knew early on that I was going to be a writer. Growing up in the Great White North of Minnesota, there wasn't much else to do but read when you got snowed in. I think that's why I love books so. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I arrived on this world on Easter Sunday, March 29, just a few decades ago. With no other siblings, my life was rather quiet. So, books became my best friends. I'd travel to the worlds I'd find there, talk to the people I found there, and lived in their worlds. As early as age three, I'd already started creating my own stories in my head.

I didn't get them down on paper until I hit elementary school. Back in the 70s, teachers encouraged creative writing, but in limited scope. In between assignments, I'd write poems; granted, they were about teddy bears and my heroes Han Solo and MacGyver, but it was writing. Soon, other things like hockey and schoolwork placed writing to the back burner.

It wasn't until high school when Dad got transferred to Austin in the mid-80s when writing became a focal point in my life. Not only was that the year I wrote really depressing poetry about leaving home, but that's the year I met Suzanne Thompson, my high school English teacher.

Mrs. Thompson was that special kind of a teacher, one who would take the time to encourage a student she thought had a particular talent. For others, it was their analytical skills. For me, it was writing.

It all started the week we read about King Arthur, Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table. In an inspired move, she presented us with our assignment — write your own Arthurian Legend. I though, how cool. Most people went the solo road, but I paired up with my friend Debbie and away we went to work on our masterpiece. She did all the artwork in addition to storyline contributions, but most of the legend was written by me.

Then the day came when the stories were due. I still remember walking into the classroom and seeing my fellow students tearing off the edges to their printouts (this was the age of the dot matrix printers, remember). I started to get nervous. Most of them counted only ten pages; the story Debbie and I turned in that day numbered 45 handwritten, single sided pages all tucked into a three-ring binder.

The story was a hit. She loved it, and soon became my faculty advisor. Many of the multitude of papers I turned in, many were used as samples to the class. Because she believed in me, I believed in me, and I excelled.

It wasn't long after that I graduated and headed to the University of Texas at Austin. Once there, I discovered things weren't going to be as easy as high school had been. As an undeclared freshman, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew I loved to write, but did a person really major in that in college? Scared and extremely intimidated by the size of the university, I floundered around in business school for a couple of years. Quite by accident I discovered a person could indeed major in writing and one did not have to become a teacher. I even have two degrees to prove it: one in Screenwriting from the College of Communications, and another in Creative Writing from the English department.

I didn't start out writing right away. I kept pulling out that old Arthurian legend I'd written, changing this and updating that, but I never really threw my whole being into it. I also carried around characters to a multitude of other stories in my head — and a three-ring binder I never left for work without — but they simply stayed in their little corners of my mind. Then one day, they just wouldn't stay in the corners, and here we are today.