Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
So, twenty years or so ago, I had an idea to write a kind of middle grade sequel to MOBY DICK in which a fourteen year old boy in 1860s Nantucket hears a knock on the door early in the morning. His mother, who has been sick on and off all winter is still sleeping. His father is first mate on a whaler that is overdue. The boy opens the door and sees a stranger standing there.
Years ago I read about some millenialist group or another declaring that the world was going to end on a certain date and at a specific time. These news stories pop up every year, and not just when we are heading downhill
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 was written as a companion to THREE BEARS RHYME BOOK, using the same characters, but instead of rhyme, this book is told in prose. Baby Bear, determined not to go to bed, cons his babysitter Goldie into telling him story after story. Each story she tells is connected visually to one of his toys. In the end
This third book about Baby Bear centers on his wishes for what he will get to be when he grows up. It was first called BABY BEAR GETS BIG and no one at the publishing company liked that. We went through about a dozen permutations until settling on the title. I actually think the title was my
Baby Bear’s Books grew out of two things—first it was the follow up to the successful Baby Bear’s Chairs, both with delicious pictures by Melissa Sweet. And both books were expansions of poems that had been in my much earlier Three Bears Rhyme Book with Jane Dyer. In fact the poem “Read to
My newest editor hero is Liz Van Doren at Harcourt. She called me about two and a half years ago and said that she wanted to talk to me about doing a series of books that had the same kind of impact as my Scholastic HOW DO DINOSAURS books. In other words,
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
My editor Bonnie Verberg called and said that David Shannon–with whom I had just done ENCOUNTER–was dying to do a new book with me. (And I him!) She said he was fascinated by pirates and she had suggested women pirates. Did I know if there were any?
So there I was, walking around the halls of the International Reading Assn conference, and I stopped at the small but elegant display of Barefoot Books. I was immediately struck by their distinctive style. One in particular was The Barefoot Book of Opera Stories.