What Made Me Fall In Love With Literature?

When I was a kid, I remember reading Captain Underpants. Like, almost nothing but Captain Underpants. This was back before my fascination with Goosebumps started, and my first real love, as far literature as literature was concerned, was the Captain Underpants series. I loved them so much that I would write my own Captain Underpants adventures on loose-leaf, though those pages were less filled with great dialogue and amazing characters and focused a lot more on my shitty renditions of Captain Underpants fighting the bad guy. These drawings were not pretty, and I'm afraid that right now, given the chance to re-do them, they wouldn't look much better at all. Much as I've always tried to train myself to the craft, I could never actually draw. That part of the artistry spectrum escaped me, I guess. I can write, at least. I take some solace in that.

I always look back on my old Captain Underpants manuscripts (Not literally, because my mom has them locked away somewhere for safe keeping), and though they were abysmal, I was only about six years old, and think that if it weren't for those very books, I might not have become a writer at all.

Of course, I know that isn't true; it wasn't very long, age 8 or 9 maybe, when I stumbled across a Goosebumps book in the local used book store called Tom's Book Nook (long since gone, unfortunately). Goosebumps evolved into Mercedes Lackey, Lackey to King and many others, to Poe, Lovecraft, Blackwood. I'm a fan of many writers and even more books, but those old, comic-book style misadventures of an undercover superhero in his tighty whities who posed as a school principal during the day; those were the first books I fell in love with. Silly as it might seem now, dedicating my days to watching cartoons like Pokemon and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, playing outside with my kid brother, and reading those books were some of the best days of my life.