Cover of How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon by Jane Yolen

How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon?

The first dinosaur book did so well (that’s putting it mildly!) my editor asked if I thought I could come up with a sequel. Could I? You bet. About that time, various grandchildren had the sniffles, the snuffles, and the all-around gollywoogles, so a book about dinosaurs in

Cover of My Brother's Flying Machine by Jane Yolen

My Brother’s Flying Machine

With the upcoming Wright Brothers anniversary, every publisher in the world was planning a book about them. One of my editors (a favorite) called and asked me to do a picture book about the dynamic duo. I said, “Not unless I can find a new way into the story.”

Cover of Sword of the Rightful King by Jane Yolen

Sword of the Rightful King

I worked on this book for years. Beginning with a short story called, The Sword and the Stone, published in my collection MERLIN’S BOOKE, I noodled away at it (that’s a technical term!) a little bit each year. Finally I sent five chapters to my editor and

Cover of The Radiation Sonnets by Jane Yolen

Radiation Sonnets, The

In January, 2002, after he endured months of pain, an MRI showed a cancerous tumor in my husband’s skull. In March radiation therapy was started. The time from discovery to treatment was an eternity for us. An eternity. With that metaphor I

Cover of Hoptoad by Jane Yolen

Hoptoad

HOPTOAD is one of the shortest picture books (if not the shortest) I have ever written.But the pictures by Karen Schmidt give it a longer story. The piece began as a silly rhyme which I thought might be a board book, but my editor had broader (wider?) thoughts and so it became a picture book.

Cover of The Flying Witch by Jane Yolen

Flying Witch, The

I have always loved Baba Yaga, the Russian witch with the iron nose who flies around the forest in a mortar and pestle. When my HarperCollins editor asked me to tell a Baba Yaga story

Cover of Animal Train by Jane Yolen

Animal Train

I had written an early version of ANIMAL TRAIN called ALL ABOARD THE ANIMAL TRAIN which I tried to sell–unsuccessfully–for a number of years. It lacked something, but I wasn’t smart enough or alert enough to understand what it needed.