I generally have an idea where I want to go, but I don't know how I'm going to get there.

I creep over to my chair and sit there with my notebook and my thermos of coffee. It's my best time for thinking, because I haven't started thinking about anything else yet, and the thoughts can kind of go in and out of my head.

It's really daunting when you have just spent a lot of time on something to think about tossing it out. But once you've started something better that's working right, then it's pretty easy to let the first one go.

Ideas mostly come from the work itself. Often when I'm drawing, the words will be bouncing around in my head, and when I'm writing, ideas about the drawing happen.

With most of my books, there are some parts that pop up right away, and other parts I have to wait for.

I started thinking about [ what book is going to go next] when I was working on As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth.

It would look like a notebook with dividers, and there'd be different subjects and things [preschoolers] could do, so that they could feel like they were going to school also.