So, here’s the deal.

I’m The Plucky Reader and I am addicted to books. I have been for as long as I can remember. I’ve been reading so long, I can’t even remember learning to read. I know that my grandmother taught me by using Disney tapes. She said that I learned different letters using the different fonts on the VHS tapes. I was four the first time I read a chapter book. Not because I was exceptional, but because I was one step off from those creepy Your Baby Can Read kids that used to be advertised on TV when I was little. (Totally parting the kimono here, but those kids couldn’t read, they recognized sight words as a unit, the same way we see a stop sign and know what it means without reading it.)

So, life progressed the way you would expect for a book nerd. I was everybody’s friend. I was the quarterback of the football team. I graduated valedictorian. I married my high school sweetheart. We have 2.5 kids, a white picket fence, two dogs, several acres in the country, and exactly $30 million in my bank account.

Or, you know, I have a handful of friends, I rode horses and ate my feelings, I graduated just outside of the top 10% of my class, and I married my college sweetheart. We have 3 dogs and no children and a chainlink fence in the country and our lives are pretty damned amazing. You can probably guess I wear glasses, because–hello–stereotypes exist for a reason, amirite? And you know what, I wouldn’t trade anything.