I started writing stories when I was six years old. I was a very shy kid, extremely shy, and I had a fabulous first-grade teacher who told me to write.
I was an editor for supplemental math, science, and literature programs for the primary grades and became very well versed in elementary curriculum, particularly PreK-2.
I'd always been around kids, and when you don't have kids, you have a lot more time to do things. Before I had kids, I was a lot more prolific and wrote books a lot faster.
In junior high, I was still writing poems and stories. In college, I was a journalism major. When I got out of college, I went to work for an educational publisher, so I was still writing, developing curriculums.
Sadly, I haven't been able to find my earliest stories, but the impact of being told by someone important to me that I could do something special is immeasurable.
There is a page in 'Diary of a Worm' in which the worm tells his sister that no matter how much time she spends looking in the mirror, her face will always look just like her rear end. Any girl that grew up with brothers can relate to the merciless teasing.