I recall with particular clarity one of my first visits to the Perrot Memorial Library in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where I was raised.  I relive the chill to the marble entranceway, so welcome in summer, the smell of the cloth and glue (I suppose) of the books themselves, tucked away on dark wood shelves with the Dewey decimal coding on their spines.  The gateway to other worlds, especially, a few years later, the far away world of  Rudyard Kipling.  We had television in those days, but it was black and white, and the world of books was in living color, a world of adventure and intrigue and action and, for me, wonder.  As a writer of fiction I now try to create "extraordinary worlds" for my readers. As a child, opening any book revealed such a world.

 

I had no idea then that several years later (we don't actually have to count them, do we?) I would be reading to my five year old daughter and she would ask a question that would spark a series of books co-written with Dave Barry, about the origins of Peter Pan.  No idea my writing would one day be aimed at the same age reader when the bug stung me.  No idea that the thrill of writing for younger readers would balance my writing crime thrillers for adults and throw me headlong into a second career that I'm enjoying more each day.

 

I can't help but be awed by the random nature of things--that my love of books as a child would eventually get me to learn how to touch type at ten so that I could write my own stories.  How that interest would fade for nearly ten years during my high school and college years, only to resurface as an urge--a need--to storytell.  I wrote for six hours a day for eight and a half years before selling my first novel.  I wrote twenty crime novels before attempting my first children's novel (The Kingdom Keepers: Disney After Dark).  It took my daughter to give me the idea to introduce a boy who would become Peter Pan, and it took Dave Barry--a writer I had admired for years before ever meeting him--to take an idea into something readable.

 

But it all started with children's books.  And I can only hope it will never end.

 

 

Editor's Note: Ridley Pearson is the author of The Kingdom Keepers Series as well as co-author of The Starcatchers Series.