We make magic bigger by demystifying the creator. It's a funny thing. When a regular real-life person replies to a tweet or a photo or a handwritten letter, the regular real-lifeness of that interaction turns into possibility. 'You could do this, too!'

I've been chosen for TD Canadian Children's Book Week 2017, a national effort that brings Maritime authors and illustrators to the Yukon, Manitobans to Newfoundland, and Albertans to Nunavut for a dizzying week of workshops.

“Never didactic but wisely intentional, it is just a matter of time before The Flight of the Griffons takes off and lands in classrooms and homes everywhere. Missy Bullseye oughta rub shoulders with Harry Potter on the world stage. This is not hyperbole...”

“Flight of the Griffons is much more than an adventure story. Flight of the Griffons could be read as a stand-alone, but to have read the first one in the series would make it even more satisfying! So buy both volumes!”

Chefs curse and yell in a pressure cooker, squishing organic matter into mathematically-shaped molds. Organic matter always objects, yet we continue to squish, and this is art. Presentation is at least three of five stars. That's what makes you gasp.

I come to oil country with a book about radicals who wish for the end of pipelines. But that's not what it's about. It's the friction of prosperity and concern, ability and disability, well-placed outrage and courage. It's banjo song and smoke in your eye.

I fly into Edmonton and on from there to schools in Lethbridge and Stand Off—passing through with gifts for them and soaking it up, reading, stocking their library with Missy and airborne resistance.

I don't know if it's fair to feel like the luckiest person in the world when there are people in the world who fall from a third-story window and get caught by a street vendor. But I do, god, I do. The book launch is tomorrow.

It’s just how things are, we shrug. Rasmus Krook is the Captain of the Griffons. He doesn't shrug. Here I get pronunciation and grammar lessons from a Swedish speaker to take on his voice!

Whenever I'm down Penelope, my editor, sends me pictures of a gulper eel and says THIS IS YOU. She's brutal and brilliant. She tells me to quit thinking I'm special by being afraid to open the box that's on its way from the printer in Quebec.

I am the barest minimum, clean clothes picked out of a clean-enough pile, supper at 9, bedtime when the sun comes up. When it was time to finish, I wrote from 10 AM until 4:30 AM. 60,000 words edited in 18 hours without a blink.

Adult fiction? More pirates, a book three? Poetry? That plus editing, photographing, teaching. The year is stacking up. Somebody burst in and threw all the windows open and it was fresh and bracing and I think, maybe, it was all of them doing it all at once.

For the next month or longer, I'm banned. No edits, no additions, no tweaks. The story is in my editor's hands and from there, we'll figure out what to do with this heavyweight, set a deadline, and look forward to line editing and production.

Two weeks since the manuscript. The first draft is in her hands but it's got holes and dubious underpinnings and while I've obeyed the stay-away order in principle, I've reorganized and rewritten the story fourteen times in my head.

The next book turns its attention to Missy, you might already know. She travels the world and meets new and strange pirate crews, and becomes a spy herself, and encounters a mystery — in that order. We'll still have Dreads, and Eric and Joe feature too.

Missy is unimpressed. She’s not one for fussing, nor for waiting. She wants to crash a flying beast and engage in illegal sabotage and write to Eric on coded postcards and it’s all stuck at the bottleneck of me. She tries to help, but I'm thick as bricks.