On a recent visit to my family home in South Florida, I discovered a surviving draft of an attempt I'd made at writing a fantasy novel between fifth and sixth grade. The lost-to-time full version stretched across almost five hundred hand-written wide-ruled notebook pages, though this early draft only collected the prologue and first couple of chapters.

Over a decade ago, I found this little treasure stuffed in the netting behind a seat on Southern California's Pacific Surfliner.