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.
My third and last (I swear) Holocaust novel, hung on the armature of Hansel and Gretel, about twins Chaim & Gittel who are 14 when the Holocaust begins and they and their parents are moved from a lovely cozy house with a front and back yard
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.
Trash Mountain after I had been rereading a lot of Jane Austen and that voice was stuck in my head. Except, of course, this was a squirrel. I knew quite a bit about the war between the red squirrels and gray squirrels, mostly from British magazines and newspapers (I live part of the year in
I was asked (at a time when I was incredibly busy) by National Geographic too do a book of amazing (often heroic) animal stories. I said only if I could write it with my children, all of whom were well-published writers. They agreed. I made a list of fascinating animal stories, from the dog (& team)
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
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 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