The TED Fellowship exposed me to a set of youngsters who had wilder ideas than I did - and almost all of them were pursuing their wild and crazy ideas without fear of failure.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
All the old school Young Adult novels inspired me. I grew up reading R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, Richie Cusick, and so on. I loved how you never really knew who the 'bad guys' were in their works, and I wanted to capture that feeling with 'Don't Look Back.'
In my early teens, science fiction and fantasy had an almost-total hold over my imagination. Their outcast status was part of their appeal.
Growing up in the '70s and '80s, science fiction and especially fantasy had such a stigma attached to them. I felt so punished and exiled for being devoted to these things.
From a young age I was obsessed with the mysterious, the esoteric, the paranormal.
I went through a whole phase when I was younger of being obsessed with Tolstoy and Kafka and Camus, all those really, beautiful, dark depressing books.
By the time I was 10 or 12, I had discovered the lure of the romance genre - and the dusty copy of 'The Thorn Birds' on my parents' bookshelf.
I discovered philosophy in my youth when I read 'wildly,' and thus I was exposed to the world of ideas.
I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.
Hoping they'd been inspired by the examples of Anne Frank and other teens who had turned negative experiences into something positive by writing about them, I handed out notebooks for my students to journal about their lives. There was some initial resistance. But then the stories poured out of them, full of anger and sadness.
I was a kid with a lot of different, strange interests - kind of crazy.
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