You are a reader! Love you!

       I grew up in Peoria, IL where there was a public library just four blocks from our house on Homestead Avenue, if you can call two city blocks an avenue.
       I read through every mystery-related book in my age group and got permission from the librarians to advance my reading level to adult. So I was losing my young reality with the help of Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler, Rex Stout and Daphne du Maurier, among others. 
​       I started writer-dabbling in second grade with a poem about my Brownie Troop #9 that was reviewed by those girls described with lyrical grace. Only one disliked my opinion, which proved my point.
       As a teen there were a few romantic-themed poems as I was in heartsick love with a boy living many miles away.
       As a high school sophomore, an English class writing assignment found me pulled aside by my teacher. She asked from where had I copied my story. I told her my story about a boy and his family escaping Yugoslavia came from my imagination after reading newspapers. 
       A couple months later she again took me aside. This time she said my story was published in a teachers' magazine. I never saw a dime. But I sure was happy!
      At eighteen, with pencil and lined notebook in  hand, I wrote a romantic historic western after much research on the trails west and Indians who inhabited Texas. I finished it on a Royal typewriter. It's still sitting in a drawer.
      I was in my late 30s before writing became continuous passion and I started getting paid for magazine articles.
​     Then I sold a novel to a New York publisher! ​

Judy Douglas Knauer