JANICE BLAKE

My very first writing project was a play. It opened with a steady stream of passengers boarding an airplane bound for a ski resort in Idaho. I had no particular plan in mind for what would happen next. But what did I know about plotting or narrative tension? I was only eight years old. The play remains unfinished... At age eight, I didn't know what I wanted to write. I only knew that writing was what I wanted to do. As it turned out, my entire working life involved the commercial side of writing-advertising copy and collateral, product packaging and corporate brochures, and editing-books…about child development, architecture, and business... Janice Blake, author of The Battalion Artist, World War II story of a U.S. Navy Seabee who created a visual diary of his two+ years in the South Pacific.