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TheEvilDog:
Very similar to me. We had a teacher when I was in 4th class (about 9-10) who would shout and roar at everyone, until one say he saw me with my head down. He thought I was messing or something, stormed over and demanded to know what I was doing. As it turned out, I was reading ahead in one of our English books. When he saw that, he apologised and then took every opportunity to encourage me to read. It even got the point where during a Parent-Teacher meeting, he told my parents that he loved how much I'd read, even comics if I had them.

Dngrsone:
I read my entire biology textbook by week three... same with history, now that I think about it.

I might have been a wee bit bored in class.

Case:

--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 12 Jan 2020, 16:59 ---This must have been asked many times before I came up with it.

Was the author of "The Never Ending Story" paid by the word?

--- End quote ---

I was unable to find details on Ende's contract on the Germanophone interwebbertubes, but I think it unlikely. The title may (partially) be a pun on his surname - 'Ende' meaning '(The) End' in German - as well as the book's genesis. Ende had originally announced to his publisher that he had an idea for a story about a boy who literally becomes a part of the story he reads, but that he expected to not be able to wring more than a 100 pages from the idea. The publisher replied "You do that - write a short book for once".

According to Ende, what happened next was that once he started taking the idea seriously "the story exploded in my hands".

When the deadline approached, he had to admit to said publisher that he found himself unable to get the damn brat out of Phantasia again - "Bastian doesn't want to come back again" - and he strongly implies that he habitually refused to employ cheap author's trick to resolve plot problem. The boy would find a way out on his own, and everybody - publisher, printer, readers - had to have patience until he did (he remarks that at the time, appointments with printers ahd already been made, "the paper was ready (to be printed)")

He found that his original Bastian - a much more asocial, reticent, withdrawn kid than the one in the published version, who lacked the latter's desire for community and social interaction - didn't work, as that Bastian would have no reason to want to come back to his real life again. So Ende ended up rewriting much of his draft (By his account, the book represents about a fifth of the source material). He handed in the draft more than a year past the original deadline.

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_unendliche_Geschichte

TL;DR - I guess the title may, in part, be an in-joke between Ende and his publisher. And the discrepancy between his original estimate of a hundred pages for a book that grew to nearly five times that length (480 pages) ... dunno how length figured into his remuneration. Ende was not one to suffer indignities in silence - he famously sued (and lost) to have the production of the eponymous movie halted, or the title changed, and insisted his name be withdrawn from the credits - but there is no report about any disagreements about his payment for a book that deviated in many ways from what was initially agreed upon (granted, this would also be congruent with his being paid by page number). What he did seem to have cared about - fanatically so - were his characters and the artistic integrity of his work, and by '79, he seemed to have been in a position to afford such devotion (Previous novels, like Momo, or the Jim Button series, were already bestsellers in Germany in their own right. Methinks Ende occupies a place in German YA fiction similar to Stephen King in the US, though the latter is, of course, much more prolific, and, more importantly, still alive).

LeeC:
Was there ever a myth about a virgin goddess (or god) that was know for their purity but came across someone they found so irresistible that they were willing to give that up, only for that person to reject them out of fear from the past stories of the diety murdering people that accidentally stumbled onto them bathing in the woods?

Cornelius:
That sounds a bit like the story of Artemis and Hippolytus, though that was more out of his devotion to purity, than about fear, if I remember correctly.

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