Throwback Thursday: Where It All Began

As the first Throwback Thursday post, I thought I'd start from the VERY BEGINNING of my reading/writing escapades...

Such as my earliest memory, before I knew how to read. I know this, because of this book:

I distinctly recall coming across it and being intrigued by the stone bear and the little child with the blond hair that could have been me. I remember flipping it open, and finding only sparse illustrations (since it was a juvenile novel, not a picture book)--but I thought I could explain what was going on in each picture.
Imagine my surprise, five years later, coming across the same book and thinking I knew the story--and actually reading something completely different from what I remembered. That's when I knew I was going to be a writer.

My love for fantasy comes from my older sister, who loved to play make-believe and direct and stage her own plays and home movies, and was almost always my favorite babysitter. She could make the backyard turn into a magical world unto itself. She, too, had a writer's imagination. She didn't just write any book, though. I will always remember the time when my sister showed me THE BOOK. The book she wrote on our old Macintosh SE, if memory serves... some of the pages were definitely from a dot-matrix printer! Oh, I remember that printer... It was really noisy, and I would wait as the pages came out and would try to tear off the "dot" strips on the edge and make them as long as I could without tearing them... I remember doodling on them, folding paper caterpillars...

Anyway, back to THE BOOK. I found it the other day, digging through the closet of our old schoolbooks.

It's a heartwarming adventure about a young boy who brings home a mysterious book from the library, discovers its connection to a magical world, and finds out that he is intended to save that world from the oppression of dark, evil forces.
And so the adventure begins....

Unfortunately it was never finished. Perhaps someday...

Tune in next week for more glimpses into my writing history!