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Honestly, in creative terms, I burned down the house and everything in it when I wrote This is Not a Werewolf Story—it’s a bonfire of all that inspires and fascinates me, from medieval French, Celtic, Norse, and Native American legends to the wave theory of light and the tracing of genetic history through the maternally transmitted mitochondrial DNA.

But there was one source I discovered after I had written it.

I was finishing my first major revision when my sister told me a story my grandpa had told her. One of the ones he probably told over and over, but he never told it to me.

My grandpa was born in a town called Welcome, where Mosquito Lake Road meets...

The summer before sixth grade my family moved. Again. This time to Hawaii.

Obviously we couldn’t take the rabbits, but that was okay since we were getting a little sick of them and the way one of them kept having babies and the other one kept eating them.  The hutch where they lived looked like a major crime scene most mornings. My dad said they’d gone feral. Nobody went into the backyard anymore.  They ran the place. I have a picture in my head of my sister standing up in a patch of chard, her index finger pointing straight out with a rabbit attached to it by his teeth.  It seems likely that there was a lot less blood than...

If you were wondering how I found an agent and a publisher for my novel, or want to know why I called it This is Not a Werewolf Story, or how my son made it impossible for me to give up, then here’s a short interview with the website that helped me organize the process. The story of how my novel found a home with Simon & Schuster’s Atheneum Books for Young Readers can be found at querytracker.net.