This is what influenced me the most to become a writer. My Dad was an around the kitchen table storyteller whose stories of apples that were really tomatoes and bears that lived in the garden drew me into his world. My older brother had an imagination that was too big for the house. He did things like putting a bandaide on a scratch on the floor, gave me pirate maps to buried treasure by the sandbox and told me of the aliens in the neighbor's backyard. Growing up, the local library was like a rocketship to anywhere, and its books the fuel for the engines of more...
