On Reading the Fantastic and Writing the Meh

I learned to write when I was "young."  As a sixth grader — all of eleven years old — I developed a fixation on The Lord of the Rings.  And also Dungeons and Dragons.  With character sheets on one corner of the desk and hand-drawn sketches of a "hobbit swashbuckler" in the other corner, I put all my attention to the beautiful blank page before me: the story.