Juvenilia

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Many of the books I’m reading this summer are books that I will or may teach in the future. Reading with that purpose in mind has got me thinking about the books I read when I was in high school. It was a long time ago, and my memory is a bit fuzzy, but here’s [...]

It comes as a surprise to some people when I tell them that English was not my favorite class when I was in high school. No, that honor went to history class — and social studies in general. I always did very well in social studies; earning an A in those classes was very easy [...]

When I finished writing the first draft of The Spring, just days before my own high school graduation, I never would have thought that my extraordinary pace of churning out story after story, manuscript after manuscript was about to come to an end. I probably thought that the prolific pace in which I wrote throughout [...]

And so I spent my teenage years writing. As I’ve mentioned before, the novel-length works were divided into sci-fi and what I called “realistic fiction.” I also wrote short stories — about 40 in all. These were mostly sci-fi stories in the tradition of The Twilight Zone. Some of the stories were worse than others, [...]