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Strange as it may seem, as a preteen my favorite movies were
love stories rather than westerns, horror films, detective stories,
adventures, and musicals. The relationships between everyday
people have always keenly interested me. I use movies as a
reference because reading books was not a pastime in my family.
When I told a ninth-grade English teacher I had no interest
whatsoever in diagramming sentences and conjugating verbs, she kept
me in after school everyday, wiping out my sports activities, until
I became so infuriated that I started studying English grammar just
to get back at her...and went to the head of the class. I
couldn't stand the sight of that woman. Now of course I love
her. She was an angel in disguise.
About halfway through my four years in the navy, a sailor who was
being discharged gave me a copy of 30 Days to a More Powerful
Vocabulary. That one book changed my life. While
attending a night class in English at the University of Hawaii, I
wrote a term paper on the English novelist, Thomas Hardy, read his
Return of the Native, and fell in love with his work.
The instructor gave me an A+ on the paper and told me I should
consider writing as a career. I was 21 then, and decided that
one day I'd write a novel. It took a few years, but I finally
got around to it.
-
Frederick Regenold
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