Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
The book began with the idea of LITERARY TEA PARTIES and somehow morphed from there. It was my idea, but early on I got daughter Heidi–a great cook–interested in it because I am only a very very plain cook and she is always interested in experimenting. We sold the book in the early 2000 or
This book was meant to be a companion to our successful COLOR ME A RHYME, but I consciously decided to make the poems simpler and to concentrate on rhyming poems since counting books are for the quite young. Along the way, Jason found some wonderful shots for the early
The last of the Stuart quartet—and originally titled Rogue’s Apprentice except that the publisher had launched a hugely successful “Apprentice” series and didn’t want it confused with that—this book takes place during the Highland Clearances. That was the time the Scottish lairds decided it
So Patrick Nielsen Hayden, one of my Tor editors, called me up and said, “Hey, you have a barn, let’s put on a play.” Sort of. What he really said was, “Would you be interested in working with me on a Year’s Best Sf/fantasy collection for teens?” And my answer was, “You mean it hasn’t been done before?” Though I already knew that. And so the adventure began.
I had done a picture book years ago for Harcourt–long out of print–called THE LAPTIME SONG AND PLAY BOOK and knew there were many many more lap games then the ones I’d used for that 32 page picture book. (One song or play game per double page makes for a fairly limited selection.) So when Liz Bicknell,
This is the third of the big books about those dinos. It’s about table manners–the good, the bad, and the ugly (“Does he flip his spaghetti high into the air?”) The Scholastic’s marketing staff,
This short novel has a long and complicated history. My agent was phoned by an editor at Scholastic wanting to know if I had any interest in a new series they were starting called HORRORS! It was to be novels based on old fairy tales brought up to date, with a frisson of terror
Here is a complicated and ironic book history. About ten years ago I sent around a proposal for this book, listing about fifteen cat folk stories I’d like to retell. Every publisher I sent it to (including Harper) turned it down.
My newest editor hero is Liz Van Doren at Harcourt. She called me about two and a half years ago and said that she wanted to talk to me about doing a series of books that had the same kind of impact as my Scholastic HOW DO DINOSAURS books. In other words,
This is another long story. After having done a bunch of music books with my son Adam in the 80s and 90s, I made a list of other possible interesting collections, and Work Songs was high up on that list. I sent the ideas around to many of my publishers