I'd always been around kids, and when you don't have kids, you have a lot more time to do things. Before I had kids, I was a lot more prolific and wrote books a lot faster.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.
I wrote every day. I don't think I could have written 'Just Kids' had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.
I think I would have written more books if I'd had fewer kids or had them earlier, but I think the books in general would have had a little less spark to them.
I'm really glad I didn't have kids earlier, because I probably would have ignored them. I was so into my career. I could just go and play a ton of shows, night after night after night. I can't do that anymore.
Being a late bloomer, I really didn't have any interest in children until my late 30s, but I'm so happy I didn't go through life without that experience.
And I think in your 40s, you land a little bit, physically and mentally, you arrive at a place where you feel you've learned some stuff. Having children at that point meant I had something very useful to do for the next 20 years.
I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.
I read a whole lot as a child, and, of course, I still read children's books.
I discovered writing children's books was a way to keep living in my imagination like a child. So I wrote a number of books before I started 'Magic Tree House.' Then, once I got that, I never looked back because I could be somewhere different in every single book.
There were always kids better than me. Because of that, I had to learn to be a role player and do my part.
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