I served as one of the Guests of the Honor, along with regional author and former Newsweek reporter James Bishop, Jr., of the First Annual Sedona Book Festival (October 2-3). Although my new urban fantasy novel, High Crimes on the Magical Plane, isn’t officially published until October 15, my publisher made copies available for the festival, so we were able to introduce it that night. Here’s the speech I gave when I received my honor:

It occurred to me recently that my relationship with books is one of the longest ones in my life. Longer even than my relationship with my husband, Joe, and we were married in kindergarten. Or so I tell people.

Though I’ve taken some detours in my life — some planned, others complete surprises — it astounds me that my life continues to weave a path through the world of books.

The most profound moment in my relationship with books came when I was around three-and- a-half. I didn’t have access to many books. Occasionally, we got some from the library, or sometimes people loaned them to us. On very rare occasions, my parents would buy me one, but not often.

It was on one of those times when they did buy me a book, that a profound revelation struck me. It hit me for the first time what it meant to actually own something, that I owned that book, that I never had to give it up.

I never felt that sense of ownership with anything else. Not with my toys, or even my dog. Just a book. Owning that book made me feel as if I possessed incredible riches. It felt that special.

I couldn’t have put it into words then, but a book isn’t just a pair of cardboard covers and some pages. Books contain adventures, enlightenment, journeys far beyond the limits of our lives. They connects us to other minds and hearts as nothing else does. That’s what books gave me then, and it’s what they give me now.

Despite the depth of the epiphany I experienced, it saddens me that I don’t remember the title of the book that brought it about. I know it was a Golden Book. Perhaps I understood even then that I would come to own many, many books in my life, and I would guard them all the way a miser guards gold.

The funny part was, when I felt that astounding sense of good fortune because I’d become the owner of a book — I didn’t know how to read yet.

But I didn’t let it bother me. I simply ignored the words written on the page, and made up stories to go with the illustrations. I could go through the same book a dozen times and make up a dozen different stories.

My sister was born shortly after I turned three, and my parents discovered they had their own in-house baby entertainer. They propped the baby beside me and handed me something with words and pictures, and I became our family storyteller.

I was already a writer, I just didn’t know it then.

I wouldn’t know it for some years to come, but at that tender age, my life’s path had already been chartered. Every writer has a story of how she came to the calling of stringing words together, and that is mine.

As a toddler, naturally, I didn’t question that stories came to me in voices that I heard — all kids have imaginary friends.

But now I’m grown, and I still have imaginary friends. Writers and schizophrenics are the only adults who get to hear voices. The difference is that writers have to figure out how to make it work for them. It’s all that writing and editing and rewriting, and even rejection, and all the other things that grown-up writers face, that keep us relatively sane.

Everything I’ve written has come to me first as a voice I’ve heard in my head. It’s always been a strong voice, with a really robust personality, but only the barest sketch of that voice’s circumstances or traits.

Initially, I always feel a great surge of excitement when a new voice speaks to me.

But then, I resist it. It never seems possible to spin out the few lines a voice might spout into everything that will be needed to fill a book. It takes more than a dash of personality to sustain a whole novel. It takes immense work and imagination and stamina. To go from those few lines to a whole book is like trying to build a bird from a feather. Even though I’ve completed quite a few novels now, and they’ve all started the same way, I’m never convinced I can do it.

But the best characters come back at me harder, with more and better material. The thing that’s most significant about the really good ones is that while they’re still only showing me the tiniest part of themselves, they speak as if they’re already a fully developed character. It’s as if they exist somewhere already, even though I haven’t written them yet.

Really determined voices carry me along, until my hope matches theirs, until I’m as certain as they are that we can create something memorable together.

And as fabulous as that sense of ownership was that I felt about a book as a toddler — it’s thousands of times greater when that’s your own name on the cover of a book.

Despite the role books have played in my life, some people say we’re living in a post-literate society today — I’m sure glad my husband, Joe, and I picked such a good time to open our bookstore and to engage ourselves in another aspect of the book world.

I don’t believe it, though — people will always divide their times with other forms of entertainment, and the techier-types will find new and better forms of downloading.

But books will always be as essential to some people as they are to me. I see these people every day, I see how their faces light up when they find the most perfect one. I see how they enjoy just holding the physical object in their hands.

And when they tell me they’re planning to read that night in bed, or the bath — well  a book makes a better companion in those settings than a hand-held device. Unless you want that bath to be your last.

Especially gratifying to me are the kids we see in our store. When I look at the faces of the boys and girls who carry their books to the register, often unwilling to hand them over so they can be scanned because they just don’t want to be parted from them, I see myself in those children. I see the girl who felt that profound sense of wealth simply because she owned a book.

I’m still amazed at the degree to which my life has been entwined with books. And when I look at those kids who already love reading, I have to wonder whether some of them might find their lives totally immersed in the various aspects of the world of books as well.

From where I stand, a life spent with books can be a pretty great one.