Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
My son Adam Stemple and I had written two “Rock and Roll Fairytales” for Tor books—Pay the Piper and Troll Bridge. But when our old editor left, the new one could not push through the third book, B.U.G. which was already mostly written. It’s about a Jewish kid, Sammy, who is being badly bullied in school so he makes a golem
This book began with three of my published short stories: “The Thirteenth Fey,” “The Uncorking of Uncle Finn,” and “Dusty Loves.” Though in the end only the first story was used as a basis for the book. I’d shown several of my published stories to my new editor Jill Santopolo
This sequel was written pretty close to the time the first book came out, but publishers work in mysterious ways, and so it took (imho) far too long or book 1 to come out and I haven’t yet gotten the go-ahead for book 3, but live in hope. The book took some twists, I love the Baba Yaga character, and
If some of you think the basic plot of this graphic novel (my second graphic novel ever—and how I love the form!) sounds familiar, give yourselves an A+. It is based on, expanded from my novella, “Dragonfield” first published in 1985 in my collection of the same name.
Midori Snyder and I originally wrote and sold this as a novella, which was published in the anthology The Fair Folk edited by Marvin Kaye. The book won the World Fantasy Award.
We always thought we’d make the book into a novel,
So twenty years after the last book was written, I finally wrote (and finished) the fourth book of the Pit Dragon Trilogy. Yes, I know. It’s laughable. So we have renamed them the Pit Dragon Chronicles. I swear this is the last. All the threads have been wound up. Everyone’s fate is laid out.
After my son Adam and I wrote Pay the Piper, our first Rock-and-Roll fairy tale, we turned our attention to this book, Troll Bridge. Piper had been set in the Massachusetts area where Adam had grown up, but Bridge is set in Minnesota where he has lived for the past twenty years or so. We were
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.
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
For the fourth (and alas final) Young Heroes book, Bob and I decided on Jason because the old tales tell about how he was raised on a mountain by the kindly centaur, Chiron.