I believe it would be appropriate that my first actual post be about the beginnings of my series. I was ten years old, and obsessed with talking canine media. I grew up on Disney movies such as Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmatians, The Fox and the Hound, and Oliver and Company (I still sing Why Should I Worry sometimes when I’m getting ready for the day). I loved how animals were used to tell unique stories and comment on the human experience in ways that human characters couldn’t quite match. I began to collect stuffed dogs and use them in play-stories that involved love and betrayal, friendship and family struggles. I quickly learned that a great conflict and likable characters are the key to a great story. It may have started off as a game, but soon my stuffed animal characters became my whole world, and our simple games became more complex as I added plot points such as afterlife, a magic system of sorts, organ transplants, and political conflict. I didn’t realize so young that I was building my first world. Someday, I may actually return to that world and try to do something more upgraded with Stuffed-Animal Landia, but for now that world serves as a fond memory and the launching pad for my true passion: writing.
I was writing since before I could write, dictating to my dad what I wanted to say while he wrote it on construction paper and I drew the crummy, lopsided pictures. I soon learned to write and took over myself, doing my best to reproduce the quality picture books that I spent so much time with my nose in. As you can imagine, most of the stories were about dogs. As I grew, so did my reading material. I could not contain my joy when I discovered chapter books. I began reading Junie B. Jones and Diary of a Wimpy Kid in elementary school. Still, I was disappointed that stories about animals had fallen away with the picture books. Real books were about people, I observed. All of that changed when my grandma began to bring me books like Julie of the Wolves and Wolves of the Beyond. I devoured them in days and burst into tears when I finished them because the story was over. When my mom arrived to comfort me, she explained that those books were part of a series: there were more. I suppose the transition from bookworm to book writer truly began when I was doing a fourth grade history project on the Choctaw and ran across a name that I couldn’t get out of my head: Nashoba. I wrote the name and meaning on a sheet of paper and tossed it into a drawer. That name came in quite handy later, when I decided that I would try my hand at a real book without pictures. Wolves had always spoken to me, and every wolf story I had read had been about one wolf, or one human among wolves. I wanted to be different: capture the true nature of the pack itself. And so I sat down with a pencil and paper and began to write a story about a pack of wolves, one of which had mystical powers, and their avian sidekick Bob. And the rest is history!
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