If you're a writer, I started off much like you did. Read as kid, dabbled in stories, here and there, even a little art. (For me that pretty much meant what I could trace.) Nonetheless there was a definite creative side. Also inclusive was my imagination. Wow, did I have an imagination! You know that kid you think is going to sit down, stare at the wall, and imagine her life away. Nope, that kid is a writer (or has other creative endeavors.) Inventors are those kids. Artists are those kids. And those kids need to know that. That a "dreamer" isn't wasting their time, it's what this country was really founded on. A dream that was put into action. And that is the key, as well as the most challenging part. Putting dreamers into action.
So, I'm on a tangent, yes, I do that on occasion. (Okay, on many occasion.)
Goal here is to tell you about me. Give you a feel for me as a person, as a writer. A bio with a bigger picture and quite frankly, some rambling.
Writing for me really began when I was a teenager. I watched an old Tom Selleck movie (adaption from a Louis L'Amour novel...any guesses?) and it inspired me for some reason. The danger, the love, I suppose. I turned around and essentially wrote the same story over. Modernized (aka: no horses), setting was, of course, Oregon, and the characters were all my friends and family, aptly renamed. Okay, so it wasn't about to be the next best seller, but here's what it did for me, it turned me from a daydreamer, to a writer. For the first time in my life, I realized my daydreams could have purpose. That I could give them purpose. Suddenly, I'm not just a waste of space, God's first mistake, a nobody with no goals and no future.
In a way, it was life changing. Now, I didn't have to be sad when Prince Charming didn't come to my door and whisk me away to his castle. (Aka: The boy next door I had a crush on who didn't ever ask me out.) Now, although disheartening, sure, it was just another story to put down on the page.
My first book evolved from that movie I'd seen. Instead of the basic plot line of the movie, why not have my own plot line. Good, I like that. And instead of everyone I know, why not add a few people of my own creation. I really like that.
At some point, this story, these characters became mine. (So far removed from the movie and my original story, you'd never find any correlation.) Still, they lacked... well, a lot, pretty much everything needed to be readable.
Okay, so I'm not just a daydreamer anymore. Now, I write. (Not quite ready to say "writer" officially.) What's the next step? Reading. And at this point, I couldn't read my own writing (and I'm not talking penmanship, here) so my delusions of grandeur were really hard for any intelligent creature to swallow. So, how to get from writing, to readership? I was really into soaps, my stories mimicked this theme, but I decided that I didn't want to move to Hollywood... ever... to start writing for soap operas, so that left books. Next step, learn to write a novel.