Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

In high school, I fancied myself the trippy beatnik 21st-Century version of James Joyce who would write The Great American Private Detective Epic Poem.

I filled up endless notebooks with crazy stories that still make me giggle, but I learned all the skills that, for better or for worse, have kept me writing today.

New York Observer book editor Leon Neyfakh took me back to those days with his interview with a 17-year-old writer named Alec Niedenthal who just published in the pages of the New York Times Book Review.

It got me thinking fondly about my high school notebooks. I'll bet you have some pretty funny stories about growing up as a writer. Tell me about it in the comments: What kind of young writer were you?

Here's the original letter: "Mr. Editor, well, we’ve been whiling away for a long time, persisting on raw fish and Red Bull in the frozen caverns of the blogosphere; and we don’t mean to boast, but, to be perfectly honest, we think you’ll be more than impressed. We’re standing beneath the adit of our long-desolate cave, proffering a sheaf of papers that you might consider a manuscript."