Since then Nancy spends much of her time working as a creative writing teacher and manuscript editor. This book was soon followed by the science fiction novel 'The Door in the Lake,' was an ALA Quick Pick and a Scholastic Book Club selection. But once her son was born she secretly started to write her first children's book-the story that ultimately became her debut novel, 'Cheshire Moon,” which won the respect of members of the deaf community for its portrayal of a young deaf girl who will communicate only in Sign. She spent the next eleven years working there, writing several stories each week and winning awards. She quit school, and within a few months she had landed a job as a reporter at a small-town newspaper. Then she tried PA school instead, had an early mid-life crisis, and when someone asked her what she saw herself doing in ten years, she suddenly remembered what she had known back in fifth grade: she wanted to write. So she sat down, read all 88 Agatha Christie mystery novels in two months, took a job in a lab, got married, moved to Georgia, and spent the next six years thinking that she really should have applied to medical school after all. She switched her major to religion-with a minor in Russian of all things-happily haunted the stacks of the college library for four years, and when she graduated, had absolutely zero idea what she wanted to do with her life. Instead, she took a seminar in Zen Buddhism and decided that spending all her time talking about big ideas in small classes with bearded professors was what college was supposed to be about. And if she hadn't gone to Duke University, where she learned that in order to be premed she had to hang out in chemistry lectures with 500 other students, she might be a doctor today.

But she never thought she was good enough, so by the sixth grade she decided to be an astronomer instead: and after that a lawyer, Congresswoman, spy, and finally a doctor. She published her first poem at age ten, and decided after reading Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time' in fifth grade that she wanted to be a writer, too.

Nancy Butts has had her head stuck in a book ever since she learned to read-and she's been writing stories for just as long.

The Door in the Lake by Nancy Butts