I know I'm still young and there's a lot of time for things to happen, but sometimes I think there is something about me that's wrong, that I'm not the kind of person anyone can fall in love with, and that I'll always just be alone.
I felt ten years old and a thousand years old, but I didn't know how to be my own age. I had never felt that way before, but now I feel like that a lot.
In some ways I'm very structured.
I generally have an idea where I want to go, but I don't know how I'm going to get there.
I had a general outline of subjects. The way I start my days is my husband brings me a thermos of coffee up to the bedroom.
I love that when you're writing your mind is sort of figuring things out on its own, without you directing it.
I made a drawing for a book I'm working . It's a little drawing of a girl who's ashamed and upset and hides in the corner of the closet. It's the kind of drawing that I feel like I'm really good at.
If I could make a career out of drawing little girls hiding in corners, I would do really well.
I know if I did that [career as painter] all the time I would get tired of it.
I love when I'm trying to do something I don't know how to do, and it kind of figures itself out along the way. And that means messing up a lot. That means throwing away a lot of drawings.
I creep over to my chair and sit there with my notebook and my thermos of coffee. It's my best time for thinking, because I haven't started thinking about anything else yet, and the thoughts can kind of go in and out of my head.
I do love that discovery of when you're trying to figure out how to make something work, and it happens in a way that you didn't predict.
It's really daunting when you have just spent a lot of time on something to think about tossing it out. But once you've started something better that's working right, then it's pretty easy to let the first one go.
Some of it just involved thinking about, for example, the different kinds of science, what chemistry is.
I knew what infinity was. Being a previous art student, I knew about some art concepts.
I don't think about it that much, but sometimes I am surprised by that. I sometimes wonder why I didn't turn out to be the kind of picture-book writer who has stuffed animals that go with their books. That would be okay with me.
I don't want to make myself sound that spontaneous, because I'm not.
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.
We had a dog, Lucky, who was fourteen years old. For the last year of his life, I would take him on these walks that were long but didn't cover much distance.
With most of my books, there are some parts that pop up right away, and other parts I have to wait for.
Often they do go back and forth the whole way, and I don't know until the very end what the last line of the book is going to be. That was true here - the very last line of the book was the last thing that happened.
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.
I don't like things to be static when I'm working.
I do like to be surprised.
I'm structured with time.
