BIOGRAPHY I wrote my first story when I was 5, on a stack of notecard-sized pieces of paper that my grandma cut up and stapled together because I kept adding pictures to my coloring books. "Just work with blank paper," she told me. "Tell your own stories." I've been following her advice ever since, telling stories to stuffed animals, to my captive little brother (in the sense that I held him captive, not that he was necessarily always captivated), and now to my children. Now I am ready to share them to a wider audience.