Title Author ISBN Imprint Series Format When did you first know that you wanted to be a writer? I think it was probably when I was about ten or eleven years old. One of my favorite pastimes was playing 'reporter,' and I made up some rather outrageous stories about my neighbors. But I didn't know any 'real' writers, and had no idea how a person became a writer. When I was in college and took writing and literature courses, reading and writing became passions. At this time, I had two dreams: to be a teacher (and introduce students to all those good stories) and to be a writer. I was a teacher first, and I think that has made me a better writer, because it gave me many years to think and talk about stories before trying my own.           When did you first know that you wanted to be a painter? I first knew when I was 26 years old that I wanted to be a painter. I was living on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. I had just gotten married and my wife and I were cottage parents in an orphanage. We took care of the nine orphans who lived there. It was a volunteer job that we took just to get away. To keep ourselves sane, we painted together in our days off. Up until then I had always done a lot of drawing and painting but never thought that I could be a painter--never even entertained the idea. It was something that I always did for myself. It was never a career. Being thrown into this situation, we began painting like crazy. I don't know how it happened but it did. And that is when it dawned on me that I could actually do this; I realized that I would have to give painting to go to medical school. It was too lovely a thing to be able to paint and to work like that. I knew I wouldn't consciously happy if I wasn't able to paint. We came back to the United States, and I was supposed to go to medical school. I was completely torn. The morning of my first day of medical school, I called the school and told them that I wasn't going to come. That was when I knew I really wanted to be a painter--I cut my strings to the academic world of being a doctor. I started taken myself seriously and made myself do it. The next thing I did was to crack open the classifieds to find myself a job. I started working for an attorney as a paralegal. This led to my first steady illustration work. The next year I did all the illustrations for the Michigan Bar journal. I was supposed to make each illustration look like it was done by a different person. It was very good practice for me.