About Me
If you had asked me as a kid to tell you my life story, I would have immediately tensed and wished I were one of the characters in the books I read. Those kids were exciting—they had adventure falling into their laps at every turn!
That’s why they got to be main characters and I was just the one reading about them. But here’s what I didn’t realize at the time: the small moments in your daily life are the adventure. It’s all in the way you tell the story.
I could tell you I survived the Northridge Earthquake, but millions of others could say the same thing. Buildings shook, it was scary, etc.
But what if I told you that after the power went out that night, the only reason we had any light was because my younger brother’s plush dog toy had a flashlight in its paw? Well, now we have a story!
I grew up in the bumper-to-bumper metropolis of Los Angeles where my parents read me books every night. I dictated stories to my dad until I was able to write, and we still have my tales about Naterpillar the Caterpillar and Mortimer the Owl.
The adults in my life instilled a love of literature in me, and Mrs. Lipsey the school librarian was my mentor. Books were truly a magical getaway that could take me anywhere in the world, and I knew from a young age that writing stories is what I wanted to do with my life.
There were so many adventures at that time in my life. Being the narrator in our kindergarten production of “Peter Pan.” Getting in trouble in second grade for serving my friends cups of water into which I had swirled markers (What? The box said they were nontoxic!). Teaching two younger boys how to fold paper cranes and feeling proud when they taught it to other kids.
As an author, I look for those small moments and look for the adventures within them.
My family eventually moved to Kansas, and that’s when I really felt I’d landed in the wrong book by accident. But with time, the sunflower-lined highways and limestone deposits became my adopted home. This is where I hang my hat today.
Ideas for stories are hiding everywhere. Sometimes in plain sight.
At the Museum of the Everglades, I learned that in the early 20th Century, the local one-room schoolhouse couldn’t keep a teacher because of all the heat and mosquitoes. My novel Everglades Lessons was born.
A walk around the neighborhood and wondering why all the houses had octagon windows led to Donut Holes and Lightning Bugs.
A goofy improvisation with a friend led to Ghosts on Ice.
And it was my own memories of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum that led to my current project about the 1932 Olympics, Climb.
If you can find that small moment, that one moment that takes it from an ordinary experience to your experience, well, now—that’s why we haven’t run out of stories yet.