As a kid, my imagination was off the charts. My first real writing came in my senior year at Mainland Senior High in Daytona Beach. During Friday’s last class, we got a weekend assignment to read a book and give a book report. Problem was that my parents had planned a family trip to my Grandpa’s house in Georgia. I never liked reading-unlike my sister, who was glued to books-so I snagged one of hers on the way out Saturday morning. In Cold Blood, of all things, with zero clue what it was about. Thirty minutes into the drive, the grim true-crime vibe had me done. After a quick prayer, inspiration hit. I grabbed my notebook and wrote a fictional story instead.
Monday, I nailed the report first-everyone, including the teacher, was hooked, leaning forward, grinning. She called it fantastic but docked me to an A-minus for forgetting the author’s name. Staring her down-and the class-I admitted, I wrote it.
That sparked it all: the Lord led me to stories for my kids’ classrooms, Christmas and Easter Productions-some with casts of two hundred fifty people. Each ran three days to packed crowds of fifteen hundred nightly, and then full-on novels. Now living atop a sixty-four-hundred-foot mountain overlooking Utah Valley, it’s perfect for sparking new book ideas.
