Goodreads asked Nick Sconce:

How do you get inspired to write?

Nick Sconce I had amazing English teachers starting in 7th grade and carrying me all the way through high school and college. Each helped me in important ways. When I was a junior in high school, I wrote a short story about a spider webbing on my front porch. I'd never seen a spider like it before, and I observed it for two solids weeks. When I'd finished a rough draft, I asked my high school librarian to read it. Her critique was honest and encouraging. From there, I set out to tackle novel writing. Incidentally, I only recently saw the same spider (over twenty years later) webbing close to our church. I believe the species to be the tree-stump spider - poltys illepidus. If you happen to blow enough smoke onto its web, it will grab the center of the web and shake back and forth. The smoke falls off like dandruff.

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