Читать книгу Written in the Stars - Lois Duncan - Страница 7

Prologue

I often hear from young readers who are working on author reports, and the question they ask most often is “Why do you write?”

It’s hard to respond to that question other than to say, “I don’t have a reason. It’s just what I do.”

I cannot remember a time when I didn’t consider myself a writer. When I was three years old I was dictating stories to my parents, and as soon as I learned to print, I was setting them on paper. I shared a room with my younger brother, and at night I would lie in bed inventing tales to give him nightmares. I would pretend to be the “Moon Fairy,” come to deliver the message that the moon was falling toward the earth.

“And what will happen to me?” Billy would ask in his quavering little voice.

“You’ll be blown up into the sky,” the Moon Fairy would tell him. “By the time you come down the world will be gone, so you’ll just keep falling forever.”

“With no breakfast?” poor Billy would scream hysterically.

Eventually, our parents had the good sense to put us in separate rooms.

Aside from tormenting Billy, I had few hobbies. A plump, shy little girl, I was a bookworm and a dreamer. I grew up in Sarasota, Florida, and spent a lot of my time playing alone in the woods and on the beaches. I had a secret hideaway in the middle of a bamboo clump. I would bend the bamboo until I could straddle it, and then it would spring up, and I would slide down into the hollow at its heart with green stalks all around me and leaves like lace against my face. I’d hide there and read.

Or I’d ride my bicycle. I would pedal for miles along the beach road with the wind blowing in my face and the sun hot on my hair. There was a special point where I turned the bike off the road and walked it down a little path between the dunes. I parked it there and lay on my back in the sand and listened to the waves crash against the rocks and dreamed up stories.

Then I would go home and write them, pecking them out with two fingers on my mother’s manual typewriter. When I was ten I started shipping them off to magazines that I found on my parents’ coffee table. Those submissions were quickly returned, and I finally realized that I was choosing the wrong publications. The stories I was writing were about issues that would be of interest only to readers my own age, so I changed my strategy and began to send them to youth publications such as American Girl, Senior Prom and Seventeen.

At age thirteen, I finally made my first sale. Seeing my byline positioned beneath the title of a story that I had created was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.

From that point on there was no turning back. Or, perhaps, there had never been a time when I could turn back.

For me, a life as a writer was “written in the stars.”