Every kid I grew up with was a science fiction aficionado. In those days I never read fantasy, except for Emerald City of Oz and Tarzan. When did you first develop an interest in writing fantasy? And I got really, really bitten by the bug then. It was an assignment, I wrote it, they loved it, and they published it. I was published when I was 13, in a massively impressive county journal that published stories about Abraham Lincoln, 'cause this was Illinois. It was about a couple boys in a house that had spaceship and aliens in it. I got real strong support from a fourth grade teacher on one of the wild-ass stories I wrote. So I decided I would do better if I just tried to create my own scenarios and just write them up.

But after they got bigger, they quit listening to me. The problem was, when the kids were small, they would listen. And there wasn't anything much to do except to roleplay, so I sort of feel like I invented role playing. Kids in those days were thrown out of the house and told to go do something. I was a good student, a good reader, and by the time I was 10, I had been bitten by the writing bug. So I had role models, right from the beginning.

Download fall of shannara series