I sat down and wrote what I remembered about being nine, and that eventually became 'Amelia's Notebook.'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.
The child from nine to 12 interests me very much. And so, those were the years that I like to write about, when I'm writing.
I loved everything about being ten, eleven, and twelve years old, and seem to make most of my heroines and heroes that age so I can reexperience all those pitfalls and wonderful discoveries. It helps me to figure out my own life when I write from that eleven year old place!
Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.
By the age of nine or ten, I knew that I loved history and writing. It got hold of me and never turned loose.
In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.
My last book, 'The Language of Flowers,' I wrote completely on naptime, when my little kids were asleep.
I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.
Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.
I wrote for 10 years before I even started the 'Percy Jackson' series.