I'm Evan Ducker. I'm just like every other 15-year-old boy, except I was born with a red birthmark(胎记).
Some birthmarks are signs of serious medical conditions. I'm very fortunate—mine isn't. I pretty much live a regular life, except for people asking me about it all the time, which can get annoying(恼人的) sometimes.
When I was about 4 years old, I asked my mom why there weren't any characters with birthmarks in the books she would read to me. When we went to the library, we realized there weren't any available for little kids. Worse than that, the books available to older kids and adults described characters with birthmarks as unattractive. So I decided to write my own.
I based the story on all the real things that happened in my life. But instead of people, the characters in the book are real animals from the Galapagos Islands, including red-footed booby birds(鲣鸟). I picked a booby bird as the main character because the birds have red feet due to a vascular(血管的)condition, similar to a human birthmark!
It was really tough to get my book published. It took a long time because a lot of publishers refused to publish it. They would say there wasn't a big enough market for a book about birthmarks.
But my mom never gave up trying to help make my dream come true. And in 2005, she finally took her own money and self-published “Buddy Booby's Birthmark”. After it was published, I got letters from readers all over the world. They all shared their stories and thanked me for sharing mine. Teachers wrote to tell me that my book changed the way classmates treated each other and that my book was helping kids to accept and appreciate their differences.
Then, as more teachers started reading my book, I created a free global reading event, the “International Buddy Booby's Birthmark Read—Along for Tolerance and Awareness.”
