It's actually not very hard to re-set between the adult novels and the ones for younger readers. The narrative voices are very similar, the smartass attitude, the environmental battles. Kids love books that are irreverent and challenge authority, when authority is arbitrary, greedy or foolish. They also love it when you make fun of grownups, and I've spent my whole life as a writer doing that.

Hey. Sometimes to conclusions.

Ironically, I come from a family of lawyers - my dad, my grandfather, and now my oldest son. And some of my very best friends are lawyers, though they don't resemble the ones that appear in my novels.

As frightening as this may sound, what you see in the books is the way I see the world. And so far I haven't seen anything, either in Florida or elsewhere, to dissuade me from it.

I got overwhelmed by the magnitude of the celebrity culture in America. My background is as a news journalist, and newsrooms in the US are shrinking - investigation teams are being terminated or shrunk on newspapers all around the country. The one aspect that's expanded is coverage of celebrity culture.

I'd love to see a good script of one of my books, in these years of animations and comic book sequels, and had so many written over the years, but none quite clicked.

No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don't read, can't write, and clearly can't add.