When I was very young (about a year and a half) my parents divorced, and I was given to my mother to raise. But, being a single mother is hard, so, instead of staying home for the long spring and summer breaks, I would be shipped off to my grandparents farm in the middle of no where. A more lovely place I have never been, full of fresh green smells and bright memories.

And, the few times it would rain, or become far too stormy to be allowed outside (one year forest fires came within a mile of the main house, and I was not allowed outside because the smoke was too thick.), I would entertain my young mind with the books in my grandparents libary. They had built a huge farm house (I came from a very large farm family, but very few of them were there while I was, for I am years younger than all the rest), and the smaller house had been turned into a library, for they had a huge book collection.

And it was there I discovered Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K Le Guin, and Tolkien. Shakespeare was not to my liking at that young age.

Over the years, I have read the more advanced books; especially ones that my college professors seem to enjoy making me write long, meaningless essays about; but I still love to return to the classics. I always love to laugh when my friends discover Bradbury for the first time, and then I lend them old, well worn first or second editions that I had picked up for a dime when I was a child.

I write now myself, my style of sci-fi and fantasy is older than newer writers like Orson Scott Card, and am still trying to get my first short story published (I never realized until I started sending my story out in applications to Sci-Fi magazines how hard it actually is to get published! ), but I really have to say that it was 'All Summer in a Day' that started my love for reading, and started me off in my career as a reader, and later as a writer.

So thank you, Ray Bradbury, without that one story in that old, battered book that I read as a child that stormy day, I might have ended up in some boring career; probably a Mathmatician or Physist.

Good luck with your writing and the motto at the bottom is great!