At the age of sixteen, when I was fighting for my life in the hospital and waiting on the transplant list for a possible liver donor match, for comfort I told myself God couldn’t possibly let me die before I could walk into a bookstore or library and find my name on the shelves. Clinging to that one hope seemed perfectly natural to me because I caught the writing bug at a young age. I have always been somewhat of a storyteller. At the age of three, before I could read or write, I was dictating stories for my mother to jot down and making up my own bedtime tales. I was one of those nerds who would rather read a book than play outside and sat up under the covers with a flashlight to finish a chapter when I should have been sleeping.
