Elephant and Piggie have a very large input. They have a distinct aesthetic taste. They like books that are philosophical. They like books that are dialogue-driven. They like books that are about issues that they live with, in their own elephantine and porcine ways.

All of the life-changing awesome words and pictures and ideas inside your library are useless without just one word outside your library: Open.

Aggle flabble kabble . . . snurp?

The first bowl of chocolate pudding was too hot, but Goldilocks ate it all anyway because, hey, it's chocolate pudding, right?

If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.

I also learn a lot about everybody else's process. People create in different ways, so that has opened me up to different processes and experimenting. Laurie Keller is a character person, so she came to the project with these blades-of-grass characters that we were able to literally grow a story around.

Writing for children is as easy as describing the history of the Byzantium in three words.