One snowy afternoon in 1993, in a "stick building" of an elementary school that has since been torn down, I co-wrote my first-ever short story with a classmate on an Apple II. We were eight years old. Our teacher probably wasn't ecstatic about our plot, which featured a werewolf carving a bloody rein of terror through a small town. But she encouraged us anyway, helping us save the story to disk, print two copies on a dot matrix printer, and bind the pages with red plastic combs. She met us where our interests were, not where *hers* were. That changed my life. ⏭️ [[cinnamon and licorice]]