Thomas M. Ratliff

When I was about seven years old I found my father’s old Royal typewriter in the attic and taught myself to type using the “hunt and peck” method. It took a great deal of violent force to drive the letter arms with enough energy to create a key single stroke, but even so I fell in love with the process and spent long hours punching out stories of all kinds.

As much as I love my computer keyboard, I still miss the feel and smell of the Royal and am sure that without those first experiences, I would not be the writer or creative person I am today.

Over the years I have had some success writing for academic purposes, but my real passion is writing for "public consumption." I have written several serialized stories for the Newspapers in Education program as well as the six-volume Matty Trescott series (as Carroll Thomas, with my good friend, Carole Shmurak), four non-fiction titles for young readers for Book House of London (published in this country by Scholastic Books and the National Geographic Society), and the text for three graphic novelizations for Barron’s.

I hope to continue to write for all types of readers and expand my serialized story collection, but my long-term writing goals include two projects near and dear to my heart: a book detailing Connecticut’s role in the American Revolution, and a novel about my experiences in the Navy during the Vietnam War. But for me the writing process is still driven by the “hunt and peck” method, a daily effort to chip away at all the ideas I want to share with the world.