Since before I could read or spell very well, I wanted to write books. The idea of designing the layout was just as exciting and important to me as the words were. There are quite a few surviving examples of my early “books,” as a child retelling the stories of historic tragedies like the Titanic and the Hindenburg. In addition, I always looked forward to participating in the Young Authors Contest throughout grade school. 

When I started going to college, I also began work on a book with the intention of publishing it in physical form. I learned to use Adobe InDesign to layout the book structure and used prior experience with Photoshop to design the cover and interior graphics. I scanned our collection of family letters over a century old, wrote the transcriptions, and organized them into categories by topic. Before long, I had a basic outline for my first book. After placing the media into InDesign, figuring out chapter names, a title, and so forth, I could visualize the missing parts of the book. The entire project served as a wonderful learning experience. I spent about half a year working on “Write Soon.” After adding additional narrative, contexts, and related media, I had completed my first official attempt at writing a book.