Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
The third of my series of short stories (and poems in the back matter) collections is MIDNIGHT CIRCUS, for Tachyon Books. It follows the arc of the other two. But these are my dark stories. Who knew I had done so many! As I looked through what I had…
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.
This verse novel began as a bunch of different poems about Baba Yaga,my culture hero. I’d read a bit of a blog in which the author purports to be Baba Yaga as a love columnist. The columns were particularly snarky and strong. So I wrote a poem about Baba Yaga as a love columnist and then branched out into writing poems about her in general: having tea with Kostchai the Deathless, (When he kisses the Baba on the cheek, “it leaves a scar.”) or how she feels about her cousin the witch from Hansel in Gretel.
Son, Adam Stemple, and I wrote this second book of our graphic fantasy novel noir mystery trilogy. The first book, Stone Cold, set, as this one is also, in 1930s Edinburgh, Scotland. stars Silex, a talking gargoyle on top of a church in Scotland who works as a detective, assisted by a team of Scottish street urchins who do the grunt work.
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.
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
This began as a short story in 1994 called “An Infestation of Unicorns” in my collection HERE THERE BE UNICORNS. Not my first foray into unicorns (that would be poems and a novel called THE TRANSFIGURED HART). Then I met the Zonderkidz editor at the Texas Library Association meeting and we hit it off.
This began as a short story, Centaur Field, in a Bruce Coville anthology: HALF HUMAN, published in 2001. But I thought about it on and off for over ten years before I decided it should be a novel. Along the way, I wrote it set in modern times and then realized that the secret of a centaur born in a
My son Adam and I had begun a possible series/trilogy, got as far as a shaky first chapter and an even shakier proposal, and put it aside for stuff that was working better for us. And about five years later, editor Sharyn November asked me if I was interested in doing a middle grade fantasy