On jumping back into fiction and starting a novel I’m a writer coming home. I started in fiction. I love its power to move children; to touch them deep and deeper still. I love spinning characters out of the air, building them layer by layer until they rise from the page to walk into the [...]

Author Partners with Non-Profit for Fun Family Event A top priority for many parents, librarians and educators is putting more books into the hands of kids, more words into their heads, and more fuel sparking their imaginations. Libraries offer weekend book clubs, teachers give nightly reading assignments, and parents read aloud to their young children [...]

Alice suggested that I post a link to the poem Miss Molly Mop as it appears in Highlights September issue. http://www.highlightskids.com/Magazine/Sept09/h10909_mollyMop.asp Highlights has been a favourite of mine forever; seeing my own work appear within its fun filled pages is always a thrill. You know, as I was writing this I realized that I didn’t include the entire name [...]

Foul language, to be precise. I write for children, so I stay clear of all those Bad Words. You know, the ones George Carlin used for a whole comedy routine. Plus many more. But the thing is, despite our desire to keep those Bad Words out of sight and sound, kids see them, hear them [...]

Honestly, I was planning to see the movie. I mean, who knows? Sometimes the movie is even better than the book, or at least wonderful in its own way. The Wizard of Oz certainly holds its own. I like Disney’s Pinocchio. So I was going to give Where The Wild Things Are a chance, when [...]

The project of the week in my son’s current summer camp is to collect “new and gently used books” for Read To Grow, whose mission is explained in the cover letter as “to provide books to children.” Curious, in the light of Kate’s recent blog about new media and books going online, on phones and [...]