Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
I had been writing poems for a science fiction magazine in Scotland. (I have a house in Scotland that I spend a lot of the summer at, so it’s not as big a stretch as you think.) Because they had already published a lot of my sf poems, they asked if I would like to do a small paperback book of sf poems and I was delighted to be asked.
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
So, I got an email asking for a short story for a new dragon anthology and thought: I am SO done with dragons. But no sooner had I said that aloud, then my traitor mind responded: “The tsar’s dragons were harrowing the suburbs again.” The next three or four sentences spun out quickly.
I have been a long-time fan of Hans Christian Andersen’s work. My favorites include “The Snow Queen,” “The Nightingale” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Occasionally I am called “America’s Hans Christian Andersen,” to which I sometimes respond,
This is the fourth Tachyon collection of themed fantasy stories with backmatter and poems to go with each story. This one is all love stories that are full of magic and mystery and—of course—love. The stories had been published in other collections of mine, anthologies other people put together, and literary and sf magazines, but this is the first time they are all together by theme.
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.
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.
Original horror stories by a variety of authors, including William Sleator and Melissa Mia Hall. This saw the first publication of my much reprinted “The Baby-Sitter. ” I chose all the stories and edited them. Marty did the business end of things.
During the time that my husband’s cancer returned (see The Radiation Sonnets), though his death, and up to five years later, I wrote poetry. Some of it was to keep me sane. Some of it was to record what happened and how it affected me. And some was in the hopes that what I wrote might go out there and help others.
I had done a picture book years ago for Harcourt–long out of print–called THE LAPTIME SONG AND PLAY BOOK and knew there were many many more lap games then the ones I’d used for that 32 page picture book. (One song or play game per double page makes for a fairly limited selection.) So when Liz Bicknell,