My first publication occurred in Playmate magazine, which sounds sexier than it was. In fact, it was a Halloween poem called Katie Black Cat—with an excess of mooning and June-ing—published in a children’s magazine. The main audience consisted of people trapped in the waiting room of a pediatrician’s waiting room.

Since then, I have been published in newspapers and magazines, doing stints as a newspaper columnist, reporter, features writer, and technical writer. But it was that first publication that put the stars in my eyes. Those stars dim occasionally, but as hard as I try, I can never make them go away.