I was an only child growing up, and despite having countless cousins and tonnes of kids in the area my own age, I remember telling my mother when I was very, very young that I would never get married and that I would be a writer when I grew up. Of course, I would later talk about having children, and I could never really figure out why a husband had to enter into that… and I still don’t, but we know the reason for that now.

I played games by myself, built cities and nations in my room (where the Lego Kingdom was near the Tinkertoy Kingdom, where people were clearly taller, and across the room from the Lincoln Log Kingdom, where there were mountains and snow and it was rural but obviously quite wealthy because they all had such nice homes), wrote novels in gym class. Sure, I had friends, but I had entire kingdoms in my mind, and that, for me, is what independence is (and always has been) about.

Perhaps I’m too independent; I’m very quick to throw out the accusation that people don’t know me at all, but how could anyone hope to glean the dimensions of another person’s mental landscape? For some, I suppose, it’s a matter of imagination, but I live there, among the tornado chasers and the outdated dragoons. Now I travel alone, and I write alone, but only because it offers me more things to write about, new stories, new ideas, new characters.

Even from the beginning, I believed in doing everything you could by yourself.