that raggedy book from cover to cover, memorizing beat street lyrics, adopting the wail of a moaning man of constant sorrow, a tambourine man, a weather man, only a pawn, only a hobo, but one more is gone, leaving nobody to sing his sad song, and on and on. And I knew what I wanted to be. I would be the storyteller, the historian, the biographer of mixed up, dreamed up characters like these, ‘who push fake morals, insult, and stare, whose money doesn’t talk, it swears.’ Or those who ‘sing in the rat race choir, bent out of shape by society's pliers.’ Characters with eyes, with guts."<ref>Making the Match: The Right Book for the Right Reader at the Right Time, Grades 4-12 (Portland, Maine: Stenhouse, 2003) 5-7.</ref> Dylan's poems led Ritter to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, then to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, "and back again somehow—with different eyes—to Mark Twain's Roughing It. All journey books, all road poems, all the manic panic of romance and motion that a country boy needs." After high school, Ritter attended the University of California at San Diego. There he played baseball and met his wife, Cheryl, who later became an elementary school teacher in San Diego, where Ritter worked for 25 years as a painting contractor while trying to establish himself as a writer. Writing career Choosing Up Sides In 1994, Ritter received the Judy Blume Award and a cash grant from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) for a novel in progress. In 1996, he submitted his first novel, Choosing Up Sides, through Curtis Brown (literary agents), to Philomel Books, then a division of Penguin Putnam in New York, where the novel became the first acquisition of junior editor, Michael Green. Since then, Green has risen to become Editorial Director and Publisher of Philomel Books and has edited all six of Ritter's novels.Choosing Up Sides is set in southern Ohio in the 1920s. The novel's protagonist, 13-year-old Luke Bledsoe, is the oldest child of a preacher. Born left-handed, Luke is, in the eyes of his fundamentalist father, Ezekiel, a heathen and potential follower of Satan, for he believes the left hand is the hand of the devil. The authoritarian Ezekiel tries to "cure" Luke of his left-handedness, but with little luck. When Ezekiel becomes minister of the Holy River of John the Baptist Church in Crown