Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
Stone Cold is a noir mystery set in Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1930s. My husband and I lived in Edinburgh for six months in the late
1980s and loved every moment of our time there. when I got the
initial idea for a graphic novel in which the detective was a gargoyle
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.
A collection of poems based this time on nursery rhymes, in which poet Rebecca Kai Dotlich and I write poems from differing viewpoints than the originals. This follows the well received GRUMBLES FROM THE FOREST collection which did the same for fairy tales.
I had written this Little Frog book a couple of years ago, it had gotten some nice rejections, but then sold a picture book to Brian Sockin for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s new children’s line. Turns out Brian (fastest editor/publisher in the East) also had a line of non-bird books called Persnickety
After Jason and I did THE EGRET’S DAY for Boyds Mills, and with the then editor’s enthusiasm for another project, we settled on the idea of alligators as being a good follow up because Jason lives in South Carolina and already had a whole lot of alligator photos from there as well as from having been an Everglades Fellowship winner
I began this book (a tribute to a cam song I loved, “The Green Grass Grows All Around”) when I saw Bob Marstall’s latest work. Bob, an old friend of 35 plus years, had up to that time been notable for his careful, realistic landscapes and nature books. He won an Orbis Pictus award among other honors for them.
What to Do with a Box was first written in the 1980s and never sold. Partly because I didn’t know how to solve the problems in it, and partly because the genre (concept book) had pretty much died. So I put it in a drawer and somewhere in 2014 or so I rediscovered it, re-read it, knew how to revise it. Also, concept books were back in vogue.
I wrote part of this book (slightly altered) as a poem which was published by ricket Magazine back in the 1990s, and then over the years reworked it till it was a book about all four seasons and the circularity of nature. I hadn’t known Lisel Ashlock’s work till I saw the first sketches and fell in love with her pictures and their intricate interlock.
I began this book after I heard of a whale (or porpoises) stranding and rescue effort in one of the fishing villages in Fife, Scotland where I have a summer home. A friend who saw it all told me about it. I set it back in time and place to the 1970s when my husband and I iused to take our children camping beachside in Maine.
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