Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
Ah, The Seelie King’s War, where son Adam (my co-writer) and I untangled the history of the Seelie Court’s mysteries and the lineage of the Unseelie kings. The final book in the trilogy, where we begin with the unknowable, meet a fascinating new cast of characters, kill off quite a few beloved folk in a terrible war, and solve the biggest mystery of the The Seelie Wars trilogy.
The Last Changeling is the middle book of a trilogy. Always the toughest part. You have to move the plot along, add some new characters, but not solve any of the major mysteries/explain away all the hanging threads. Indeed, Adam (my son and co-writer) and I didn’t really yet know
My son Adam and I had begun a possible series/trilogy, got as far as a shaky first chapter and an even shakier proposal, and put it aside for stuff that was working better for us. And about five years later, editor Sharyn November asked me if I was interested in doing a middle grade fantasy
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
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.
This third book in our Young Heroes series began with my vision of a girl and a bear roaming the woods together. In the old stories about Atalanta it was said that as an infant she’d been set out on a hillside to die, and was discovered and nursed by a bear.
In many ways this book was the hardest of all to write so far of the Unsolved Mysteries, because it had three separate stories of travel to America by boat, with slaughters on all sides, and then a missing colony. Also, because it dealt in part with
The idea of a Young Heroes series came from my editor at HarperCollins, but choosing to work with Bob Harris–already my co-conspirator from Queen’s Own Fool who had a degree from St Andrews University in