My name is Elliott Marquez, and I have been writing since I was young.
My sister and I would play around on a piece of software called The Amazing Writing Machine, and when we were finished, to our great astonishment, we would sit back and let the system read our words back to us. This was in the late nineties before modern text-to-speech technology. It was an advent to us, and that was one of the things that propelled us into the world of language.