Meme different

I love to do memes on my personal blog, but am less likely to do them here on Writer Way unless they are writing related. I've been tagged by Terry from Cofffee Writer and have decided to tweak my answers to the meme just a bit so that they all refer to writing.

Here are the original rules (memes have rules): 

"Link to the person who tagged you, post the rules and five facts [about yourself]  (some random, some weird) on your blog. Tag five people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs."

Hmmm. Looks like I'm gonna be tweaking those rules, too. Because I am not going to post the names and links of the five people I tag. But I am going to tag five people. If any of them want to be linked to from Writer Way, they'll have to contact me and give me permission to point to their blogs.

So, here are my facts:

1. One of the first short stories I wrote as a child was about a Hanukkah bush and a Christmas tree.

2. In junior high, my friend Emma and I were called on the carpet by the vice principal for creating a "slam book" with short poems skewering each of our classmates. I can still remember most of the poems, verbatim.

3. The most money I've ever gotten for a non-fiction piece was a $6,000 scholarship for a story about my mother taking care of her elderly parents.

4. I wrote Johnny Cash's obituary for the front page of the iTunes Music Store.

5. After reading a New Yorker article about novelist Alice Walker, I dream of someday having an office with a big wooden kitchen table in the middle of the room to work on.