Beginnings
Carter, Jacob

JACOB: I don't really remember a time when I wasn't reading a book. I grew up reading a bunch of serious books. I collected the R.L. Stine Goosebumps books, I had almost all of those. And my aunt got me into "The Chronicles of Narnia" and then I did a bunch of different books like Animorphs or whatever and one that I would read over and over again on almost every car ride was "Frankenstein". I could read that probably two or three times on a long car ride. That was one of my favorites but it wasn't until we got dial up, as horrible as it sounds, and a personal computer that I really began writing. It sounds really geeky but we would go on chat rooms where people were telling us stories and each person took a turn telling part of a story. And so that's when I realized that almost anyone could really do this as long as you had the talent to write and you could come up and be creative. That's when I realized it wasn't just these supernatural beings that were writing these books but it was actual people. I did that for a long time and that actually helped me become a better writer and telling stories with character development and stuff like that. But then I guess I just stuck with that and in school, it wasn't until twelfth grade in high school that I really had two teachers that really pushed me hard core in my writing. We would have to write a paper every week or so in each class and they were just really particular about how we wrote, how well we wrote, what we said and how deep we got involved with the topic, how analytical we got with what we were talking about. That really got me interested in more of the power of writing and what we were telling with these stories and how we were documenting what was said in the other stories. And then when I came to college, I started off computer related and it wasn't until this past year that I realized that I needed to be writing again. I really wanted to be writing again and so now I'm a technical writing major and I hope to do something with it in the next few years when I graduate, possibly related to writing for the web or content management as far as websites go. I still really love my series books, I still love to read certain books over and over again because you get a better feel each time you read it and... I don't know.