I started writing stories in fifth grade. Every week or so, Mr. Carpenter would assign us quick 5-minute "writes" -- you wrote without pausing, just to get the ideas out. Later you'd polish it and type it up on a TRS-80 in the computer lab. It was a lot of fun. I still have my collection of those stories,  printed out on a dot-matrix printer.

Since then, I've written a musical adaptation of The Lord of the Flies, a handful of short stories, a couple dozen songs, a screenplay, and reams of sales copy. The Stoneweaver is my first novel.