I can give advice to anyone interested in writing in one word: Read! I think it's much more important to be a reader than to be a writer!

All my books take a long time to research. I spend several months researching before I start writing, and in the middle of writing I often have to stop and look up stuff. At my local library, I am one of the best customers! The research takes several months.

I can give advice to anyone interested in writing in one word: Read! I think it's much more important to be a reader than to be a writer!

My son and I discovered Terry Pratchett's books together, when he was about eleven years old. He'd be reading on his own and would start to laugh, and then eagerly read the passage aloud to me--and I'd do the same to him! Pratchett's books became a shared source of delight for us back then, and they still are today.

Each of my books has taken me a different length of time to write - eight months for Seesaw Girl, eight months for Shard, three years for When My Name Was Keoko! The publisher takes another year and a half to work on the book, so altogether each book can take up to three or four years to publish.

Why was it that pride and foolishness were so often close companions?

God bless Interlibrary Loan. I pay a lot of library fines. In the case of 'A Single Shard,' I was using books that hadn't been checked out in 30 years, so I didn't feel too bad.