Like most children, I went through a selection of potential career choices. I remember brief stints of thinking I wanted to be a teacher, or a doctor, or a ballerina. (The ballerina dream died an early death at the onset of puberty. Ballerinas don't have boobs.)

But the two careers that stuck with me the longest were "detective" and "writer." 

Looking back on it now, I only wanted to be a detective because I was living out my obsessive fascination with Nancy Drew, but I got a lot of enjoyment out of whisking away my family members' drinking glasses to "get" their fingerprints off with Scotch tape.

I can't remember a time I didn't want to write. Books, newspaper articles, stories, columns, more books... And yes, that's a typewriter in the picture. The old-fashioned kind I wrote my first manuscript on. We still have it somewhere around here. It belonged to a sportswriter for the Denver Post and was old when I got my hands on it. I should go find it...