exit, pursued by a bear

Aw! Thank you! I’m honored!

1. I can sing the fifty states in alphabetical order.
2. I’ve never been on a plane before.
3. I’ve been consistently filling up notebooks with drawings, comics, stories, poems, lists, and ideas for about as long as I can remember. I still have a notebook from when I was six years old.
4. My parents kind of let me do what I wanted as far as interests went when I was little kid. One time, I got a remote control cobra for Christmas and took great joy in slithering it around the house. It always bumped into couches and got stuck.
5. When I was a sophomore, I was staying at a hotel for an academic meet with about twenty other kids from my school. I was staying in one room with a senior and her mom, who went to go visit her sister who went to college close by (we were a few hours from where we live). I was alone in the hotel room, and everyone else left to go to dinner at a restaurant and forgot me. It wasn’t until I called that they remembered. They sent a chaperone ahead, and I distinctly remember my math teacher very firmly asking for my food order over the phone. The chaperone stayed with me until the rest of the students and chaperones came bursting through the hotels doors with a to-go box in tow, looking for all the world like someone’s life was on the line. They were very sorry.
6. My local library is one of my favorite places on earth. It’s very old and magical and has secrets.
7. One of my dreams is to have my own private library in my house when I’m older. A room just full of books and bookshelves and cozy armchairs.
8. As far as writing goes, I think the switch went off when I was thirteen. My first “real” story was about a girl who goes to a boarding school for gifted and talented students. It was pretty standard fare, but it started something major in my life.
9. The other day, I stopped by the graveyard to visit my classmate’s grave, and I ended up talking to an eighty-four-year-old man on a zero turn mower who told me about the time they found a casket on Storage Wars.
10. One of my favorite pieces of music is Waves of the Danube, a waltz composed by Iosif Ivanovici. My dad gave a beautiful music box to my mom that played it when they were younger. It was difficult to identify because the label on the box called it the Anniversary Waltz, though that’s incorrect—its alternate name is the Anniversary Song. It’s also often confused with the Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II. So as you can imagine, it gets really difficult to find online. But it’s beautiful and I love it.