I’d still be waiting tables if I weren’t lucky enough to have gotten that first book. There was no fall-back plan, no alternative career. I waited tables while I sent out stories, waiting for some editor to fall in love with my work. I just wanted some guidance on how to break into childrens books. Then I took classes at the California College of Arts and Crafts for a year since I didn’t want another degree and a year’s tuition was all I could afford. Mostly I took history where I learned how to do research, tools that have helped me in making the historical journals and working on my Young Adult novel. So I transferred to the University of California at Berkeley where I didn’t take a single English or Art class. I studied art at San Jose State but fought too much with my art teachers (I was very opinionated - I wanted to do my kind of art they wanted me to do theirs). I grew up in the southern part of the state and now live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was born in Pennsylvania, but my family moved to California when I was two, and I’ve been here ever since.
I’m sure there are other websites with excruciating detail. If you want more official information, like where I was born or went to school, I’ll give you the basics here. Keep your eye on the new ideas page and you’ll see if I ever get the book finished or published. I’m not sure I can do it, but it’ll be fun to try. It’s also my first time writing a mystery, another challenge.
And I’m working on my first chapter book, a long story with no pictures. Now I’m playing with other notebook formats, like in the historical journals and Alien Eraser (where I get to play around with making comics, something I love). I didn’t plan on the book becoming a series, but the first one sold so well and Amelia had so much to say, I kept on going. It reminded me of the notebook I had when I was a kid, so I bought it (for myself, not my son) and I wrote and drew what I remembered from when I was nine. I was buying school supplies for my son when I saw one of the black-and-white composition books. I had already published nearly a dozen books when I got the idea for Amelia’s Notebook. It means I can take risks and try new things because I don’t have to be perfect - I can always make changes. And I don’t mind, because that gives me permission to make mistakes. Each one takes a lot of revising because I never get things right the first time. Now I’ve published more than forty books and each new one is still hard in its own way. I didn’t try again until I was a grown-up and then it took five years of sending out stories, getting them rejected, revising them and sending them back over and over until I got my first book. I sent my first picture book to publishers when I was nine, but it wasn’t very good and they didn’t publish it. I’ve been making children’s books for a looooong time.
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