The two series that definitely made me want to be an author “when I grow up” were Nancy Drew and The Babysitters Club.

I remember, the first stories I wrote were in third or fourth grade. I penned a short series of “mysteries” based on Nancy Drew where one of the kids in my class would find a secret passage of some kind that would inevitably solve the question of who stole some missing item and where that item was.

They had no plot, really. They were each maybe two pages. Some item would go missing. Someone would uncover a secret passage, and item would be found with the culprit. And that was basically it.

I wish I still had those stories. They would be hilarious to look at.

To this day, I LOVE a good whodunit. I don’t trust myself to try to write one, not with my pantser writing style, but I moved on from Nancy Drew, to Agatha Christie and Poirot, to Chesterton and Fr. Brown. I never stopped.

The other series I was obsessed with around fourth grade was The Babysitters Club. Maryanne was my favorite, but I also grew to like Mallory Pike . . . who wanted to write children’s or middle grade books when SHE grew up.

I think Mallory Pike put the idea in my head that becoming a reader was a feasible, actual, tangible goal to have in mind.

I didn’t start actually writing fiction seriously until college. I started with a short story that rapidly expanded into a bloated, horrible, ridiculously melodramatic novel of chivalaric proportions that will never see the light of day.

The melodrama was entirely the point, I will say in my defense. It was intentional. But it’s just ridiculously awful.

I was able to end up recycling some few ideas and generic plot points from that novel for “The Crimson League: The Fight for Hope,” though!

And I’ve been writing fantasy ever since, thanks largely to Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.