As soon as I learned to read, I was hooked. Just as kids who are passionate sports fans often want to be athletes, kids who are passionate readers often want to be writers, and so it was with me. Though I dreamed of many career paths over the years, two remained while others came and went: teaching and writing. Fortunately for the world, there was no such thing as self-publishing when I was in college and writing horrendous love poetry. Luckily, I kept trying other genres, and I kept reading. I also graduated from UCLA with a degree in English and went on to pursue one of my two dreams by teaching English, mostly at the high school level, for thirty-six years.
Teaching was far more than a day job for me; it was my life. I had thought originally that I might be able to both teach and write, but the demands of teaching caused me to forget about writing—for a while. Then, one day I, trying to write an interesting grammar test, created one in narrative form, a short story about the students in that particular class. I got so wrapped up in it that he stayed up almost all night writing it. The students loved the test, demanded more like it, and scored better in grammar than any group I had ever taught. That experience made me realize that I hadn’t really abandoned being a writer; I had merely postponed it. I found time to publish a little at the end of my teaching career. Now that I am retired, all the stories accumulated somewhere in the back of my mind will finally be able to get out.