Veronica asked J. Leigh Bralick:

How old were you when you started writing your first book?

J. Leigh Bralick Heh, that's a great question! It sort of depends on what you consider "writing", and what you consider a "book"...;-) I remember drawing pictures and captioning them with stories when I was very young (mostly of unicorns and pegasuses — pegasi? — or, unipegs or pegicorns or whatever you want to call mythical horses with horns and wings...;) when I was very little. My first actual story attempt was about a girl who wanted to buy a puppy but only had a wheat-penny. I think I was about 6 when I started it, but the computer ate that magnum opus so I never got to finish it. This was a great travesty in my young life. :(

My first real book I started writing when I was about 10. It was going to be an epic fantasy of great magnificence. I put it away for a couple years, took it back out a few years later, worked on it here and there, finished it when I was 17, edited the heck out of it for a couple years until I swore it was perfect, took it to a workshop, realized it was total garbage (well, almost), worked on it a bit more, and then shelved it again, which is where it will stay until I get a chance to rework the plot. I recently realized that I've got probably a hundred-some pages of world-building material for that book...and that's work I don't want to throw away. (Plus, Braden was my first love and I will never, ever abandon him, so someday I will finish his story.:)

I started working on the story that became Down a Lost Road when I was about 12. It went through similar phases of work-edit-shelved before I was ready to call it finished, and even then it went through a couple more revisions before it became the book it is today.

That's probably more of an answer than you wanted to get, but hey. (At least I can say, thank God it doesn't take me 15 years to finish a book any more!;)

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