Early Works I still have one of my first pieces of writing. It was ambitious - self illustrated, and featured a character interacting with a younger version of themselves. It was also less than a page long, with letters at least an inch tall. I was four. You have to start somewhere. I have always loved words. The tooth fairy understood that, dropping off a copy of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden in lieu of payment for my first missing tooth. I grew up with Jim Hawkins, the Railway Children, Marcus Aquila and Esca. AND then I got old enough that my library card wasn't locked to the children's section. The two biggest transformative finds for me were Meghan Whalen Turners's The Queen's Thief series (you should be able to carbon date me by the fact that there were only two books in the series at the time - love you Meghan!) and the multitudes of perspectives that made up the Star Wars Expanded Universe (now dubbed "Legends" by Disney).