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I've always been drawn to writing for young readers. The books that I read growing up remain in my mind very strongly.

I remember all the way back in high school thinking about writing books. And, in fact, I've written a lot of stories. I've got dozens of stories I've written that no one's ever seen.

I grew up in a house full of books and parents who read, which led to me to reading from a very young age. And reading seemed to naturally progress to writing.

To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids' novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books.

I was about 11 or 12 when I began to pick up my mother's books.

I was passionate about reading from an early age, and I would always be carrying a different book each week.

My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.

I always wanted to write for children. When I was growing up, we were really poor. My mother had left, and it was all a mess. So I lived in my head a lot, and I would get lots of books for Christmas - from librarians and teachers - and they just fed my imagination.

I was kind of an outsider growing up, and I preferred reading to being with other kids. When I was about seven, I started to write my own books. I never thought of myself as wanting to be a writer - I just was one.

I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.