Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
I actually wrote this original fairy tale in answer to something illustrator Ed Young said. He’d originally signed on to do the art for the book “The Seeing Stick” and then pulled out of the project saying “I can’t work on this because the princess is not perfect.” (In the book she is blind and a whiner, though
I don’t actually remember how this book started. Either the editor suggested it or Andy Fusek Peters did. The only thing I know is that we all wanted a companion book to HERE’S A LITTLE POEM which had gotten sterling reviews, won some awards, and looked to become a minor childhood classic.
Chapbook for now defunct Pulphouse Publishing of the short story that was first published in Merlin’s Booke and later was fleshed out into Sword of the Rightful King.
I worked on this book for years. Beginning with a short story called, The Sword and the Stone, published in my collection MERLIN’S BOOKE, I noodled away at it (that’s a technical term!) a little bit each year. Finally I sent five chapters to my editor and
TAKE JOY is filled with 40 years of my insights, rants, jokes, and pleasure in the writing trade. Some of the essays began as speeches, some as articles, some as journal entries, some as moments of inspiration. I hope all of them help writers–old, new, and in-between.
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
My first hardcover collection of my fairy stories and adult stories, because the editor at Schocken was a fan. He left before the book was finished to form his own company, Peter Bedrick Books. Never a good start for a book, I have found, being orphaned like that. There was an British edition as well.
I have always loved the Scottish border ballad Tam Lin, first mentioned in a ballad book of 1549. It’s one of the only ones (maybe THE only one) in which the woman does the rescuing. Young Janet McKenzie (in my version) wants to have her patrimony–the old mansion of Carterhaugh–but it now belongs to the fairies.
The third book in the Tartan Magic series. An American family comes to Scotland for the summer and immediately falls into magic. The setting is in Fairburn, a made-up city that
The second book in the Tartan Magic series. An American family visiting Scotland for the summer fall into magic. In this book, the children and their grandmother visit an Eventide Home (a Old Folks home) where a magic talisman calls up a child from Scotland’s Pictish past.