I remember when I was working on All Alone in the Universe, and Robin Roy was my editor. When I first sent it to her, she said kids this age don't want pictures in their books.

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.

Some of it just involved thinking about, for example, the different kinds of science, what chemistry is.

One of my favorite moments in that book [As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth] was when something happened that I had no idea was going to happen.

The morning time is also a time when I look at what I did yesterday. That's often a jumping-off point for today.

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

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.