WRITING: First book that I remember reading was Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. I saw an older kid reading it and the cover looked so cool that I picked it up and finished it in four days (pret (...)

What did you first read? How did you begin to write? Who were the first to read what you wrote?

Whohub

First book that I remember reading was Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. I saw an older kid reading it and the cover looked so cool that I picked it up and finished it in four days (pretty good for a little kid). After that I started to read everything that he had written up to that time, before moving on to other writers that have also influenced me.

I started creative writing in grade seven. We were given an assignment in class. The teacher wanted us to write a short story about anything as long as it was description based. I wrote a story called Cannibalistic Vampires. It was a story about discovering my brother and his friends had become a new breed of vampire that didn't just drink blood, but ate flesh too. Not the best story ever. Some of the story was influenced by a movie I had just watched at the time, The Hills Have Eyes 2 (original one), and had some scenes in it that my teacher deemed as "sick and twisted". That made me happy.

The first person to read what I wrote was my teacher, Mrs. A. I handed her the Cannibalistic Vampire story and she told me that I should pursue a career in writing. She told me that even though some of what I had written was hard for her to read because of the gore and the violence, she thought I had a talent for writing and encouraged me to follow the path that I have.