When I was a little girl there were two things in my bedroom that were very special to me; paper and books, I had a drawer full of notebooks, boxes of stationary, and lots of diaries.  My bookcases were and still are full of Nancy Drew, Trixe Beldon and Anne Frank. 

In eighth grade, my English teacher presented my class with a challenge – Read 1,000 books by the time we graduated from high school. I took the challenge and began to read even more than I had been reading.  I read Charlotte’s Web, To Kill A Mocking Bird, Swiss Family Robinson and every mystery in my school’s library. I read under the covers at night, in the camper when we went on vacation and my favorite place of all, in a big over stuffed chair.

When I was a teenager, I went to Good Counsel Academy, an all girl Catholic high school. The Sisters I had for English were great teachers. They expected all assignments written using proper grammar and encouraged creative writing. I was not always happy with all those assignments but now I realize it was good practice for my writing today.