I grew up the high desert community of Palmdale California. Reading and writing was a very big part of my family life. As I look back on my childhood I now realize that both my Mother and Father spent a lot of time teaching my brother and me history, literature, etc. They were home schooling us, even before there was such a thing as home schooling. Education was very important in our house reading was our family favorite pastime. Every night before we went to bed, my mother would read us a story. My early influences were Maya Angelou, Eric Segal, James Baldwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Virginia Woolf. All of these authors wrote about the joy and the pain of life with such passion that left a lasting impression on me when I was a child. I can still remember thinking to myself, when I grow up that I was going to be a writer.