I’m very fond of librarians. I go to many librarian conferences, and I’ve found that librarians tend to be a group that has far more humor to them than most people assume. So this series was written in fondness. I like to write things that have a kernel of truth…
Q: Why did you choose this name? And why an antihero? A: When I bought a used car in my early twenties, it came with a keychain that was a memento from someone who had visited Alcatraz Island. (I haven’t been there myself.) I carried the keychain around for years,…
October 2016 I’ve never, ever been satisfied with the original covers of the Alcatraz books. The original American covers were misfires. Though I like the illustrator, the direction the publisher had him take for the books just never worked. They were a busy CG and photography mashup that ended up looking…
Oct 5, 2016 Any of you who haven’t read the Evil Librarians series might want to duck out here, because I’m going to talk about the big reveal at the end of the fifth novel. This is a post that’s been brewing since 2006, so I’m eager to talk about…
These goofy books have quite the devoted following, and over the years one of the number one questions I got was when the series would return. We had a problem with the previous publisher—well, multiple problems. In the end we parted ways, and the intrepid publisher of my epic fantasy…
From Alcatraz: I’ve finally finished working on the 5th and last book of my life story. The Evil Librarians are relentless and it’s all I can do to keep one step ahead of their nefarious plots. They even went so far as to convince Scholastic to only publish 4 Alcatraz…
I’ve always wanted to write for both adults and children; I wrote the first Alcatraz book before my second adult book was published. When I was writing the Alcatraz books, I was trying to target the book at the person I was when I was that age. It’s less that…
The ideas for my books come from all sorts of things that I see or experience in the world around me. For example, I have a big imagination and when I was younger I would daydream a lot (and often got in trouble for it). Now I get paid for…
I sat down to write Alcatraz with a writing prompt: a one-sentence line that had come to me one time, just when I was hanging out with some friends, and I hurriedly typed into my phone, and said, “Huh, I should write that story one day.” And the line was:…
I was really interested by something that may be surprising to you, and that is the constraints that I had. I find that good creativity commonly comes from having really interesting limitations. I often say this about magic—the best magic comes from what the magic can’t do—and the best characters…