Waking Dragons
After doing the monster books, and the How Do Dinosaur books, I decided to try the same kind of simply rhymes with humor on dragons. This one is the first of what I hope will be a series. I adore Anderson’s cheery pictures.
B.U.G. (Big Ugly Guy)
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
Curse of the Thirteenth Fey
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
Foiled Again
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
Bad Girls
I was on the phone with my editor talking about a follow-up book to Sea Queens which had just come out. Somehow we got on the subject of bad girl shoes, you know—high, high heels in wicked colors, or patterns, black boots with high heels
Last Laughs
Before he became Children’s Poet Laureate, Pat Lewis and I had sold several other poetry collections together–Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, the Life of Chagall in Verse, came out first. Then Take Two, our book of twin poems. (He’s a twin, I am grandmother of twins.) The third book we sold was
How Do Dinosaurs Eat Cookies?
So the wonderful editor of the Scholastic novelty books, Jeff Salane, and I were having lunch in the Scholastic cafeteria, and we were looking for new How Do Dinosaurs novelty projects to complement the regular books. Having just finished a cook book with my wonderful daughter Heidi (taste-testing recipes can put
Bug Off
Bug Off, our latest book of nature poems, is all about insects, bugs, creepy crawlies. And like the other books I have done with Jason (my youngest son, an award-winning photographer), it begins with his photographs. I noticed he already had a lot of pictures of bugs–a praying mantis, butterflies,
The Last Selchie Child
The Last Selchie Child started with a bunch of my fantasy/fairy tale poems that had been individually published but never all collected in a book. I thought about a book of them for some time. Many were not appropriate for young children because they often touch on some sexual element in the
Take Two
This book began when Pat Lewis and I talked about a possible book together. He is a twin and I have twin granddaughters and twin aunts and twin brothers-in-law, so we began writing poems back and forth to one another. Along the way, Pat became the third Children’s Poet Laureate in