Hi! I'm Sami. Samantha Holloway if you want to be professional.
I was just thinking this morning of the very first book I remember reading for myself. I learned how to read pretty early-- I had basic words and numbers down before I started school because I used to read the comics while my dad read the paper in the morning (I remember how impossibly huge those pages seemed to my four-year-old self). Then I spend several years officially learning, and being totally bored of books with less than ten pages and really short words, so I read everything that had words on it-- signs, the backs of cereal boxes, the subtitles for Clan of the Cave Bear (which taught me how to read faster, and also the basics of how babies are made). Somewhere along the line, I moved up to skinny chapter books before I was supposed to. And then, when I had just turned eight, I got Charlotte's Web out of a bookstore of my own accord, and I spent two months reading it so carefully that I think I could have written a dissertation about it. It was the first book that was really mine. The first one that made me cry just because of the combination of little letter-squiggles on the pages. The first one I clearly remember impacting my life--I still feel bad squishing spiders, and I've considered giving up all pig products (and actually do, whenever I re-read it, for a time... except that bacon is so damned tasty and I don't have that much willpower).
That book is probably why I started writing. The first thing I remember sitting down specifically to write was very soon after reading that book, and the first thing anyone noticed me writing was within a few months of it. I gave it to my niece when she started reading, and now she's eleven and devouring books as quickly as I did. I'm trying to talk her into starting a blog. Because I think that's the next step: I gave her Charlotte's Web, and now I need to encourage her to write, too.
