Stephen King’s rule #7 — “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

I was born into a family of readers. When I look at family photo albums, the earliest pictures of me and my sister show the two of us on the Chesterfield in our living room, my sister, a year and a half younger than me, propped against me as I hold a Golden Book, either “The Big Horn” or “Cinderella”. I was reading to her the stories I had committed to memory. I was more thrilled to get my first library card, before I was in school, than with my first bank book. I read everything I could get my eyes on, any printed material within arms reach, cereal boxes at the breakfast table, over and over. My favorite cereal was Chex brand, not because I liked the cereal; the boxes came with the “newsletter” the “Chex Express” on the back. Something new to read was a better prize than any trinket packaged inside. Bedtime was always accompanied by a book read to us by one parent or the other.