say you're my favorite author ever so thank you definitely so the fact that i grew up in a family of seven kids i could understand the dynamics of seven young people trying to figure out how to get along and how to be different but be part of the same group so i was definitely borrowing from what it was like to grow up with that many kids has your children and packed some of your books well i have a series of books called splurge academy for disruptive boys and so i have four sons at home and they can be full of shenanigans sometimes so the boys in sports academy coming out the emperor's ostrich is very silly and very playful it features an ostrich and a cow who fall in love with each other as well as a girl and a boy who become friends on a mysterious journey and they're very fun together as well so i had a lot of fun writing this one was very playful and then my most recent title the passion of dulce and i really enjoyed in a very different way because this went took a lot of hard work a lot of research it's set in medieval france actually got to take a trip to france to research it and i had to do a lot of reading about this time period so it's a lot of hard work but i find that the harder you work on something the more proud you are of it how do you choose titles for your books it's not easy to come up with good titles sometimes a title just sort of comes about naturally and other times it really takes a lot of trial and error to find the right title for the emperor's ostrich to me that was the title right from the start suggested that we try to find something where there were some similar consonant sounds so scandalous sisterhood prick willow place that's a litter ration and she said that's kind of catchy so we kind of played around with ideas for that and then with all the truth that's in me that's actually a quote from inside the book so it's always different to coming up with a name for a book and sometimes easy and sometimes it's a lot of nope nope a newly blended family and on top of the complication of becoming a new family they have the complication of having to survive alone on an island a nine year old two eleven year old and a thirteen year old all by themselves were you excited when you found out that i was super excited when it became a movie that's like every writer's dream to see their book turn into a movie and then on top of it to see the book turn into a movie that i actually really really enjoyed it was great so  no that's the irony of this book i actually really love middle school and one of those kids who likes middle school i like ty school but it was easy for me to identify with some of the trials and tribulations of the get middle school or i wrote goes right into the book what's the longest book you that aren't working on that right now when it's a young and old or young adult novel called the weakness of gravity read stuff like that i like fantasy stories a lot and i like books that have a lot of adventure in them so i think that's what i liked about princess juniper is she just happens to be a princess but it's more about somebody who like really independent and exciting and  she's ready to take matters into her own hands and really kind of fight for the people that she loves separatist you know her is about a princess who asked if she could have her very own country for her birthday so a group of kids take the idea of kids being on their own and how would they have their own friendships and worlds and it just seemed like something that would be a lot of fun to explore a whole little country was just kids and how you made like other books that  the real world if you will but it's a lot of ghost and a boy who make friends and have to solve the mystery and there's a lot of action and hiding from the bad guys and comical adventures and pranks and all the things like that i wrote another book called no work girl about a girl who was born in a prison in thailand and she has to make her way across the country and find her family and there's a lot of danger and adventure but it's a more realistic story so i like writing different books that are a little bit different each time but that also have a lot of heart and a lot of action and little bit of mystery often i write books based around current human rights issues around the world  my first one was set in tanzania and it talks about the killing of people with albinism based on this belief that their body parts were good luck charms in two thousand and nine i found this little itty bitty reference in a nonprofit journal that said a new safe house was being built for people with albinism and i thought well why do they need a safe house why is their house not safe why can't they stay there and that's what started me on the process of researching this book and then when i found out that this is what was going on i was so upset about it i felt like people needed to know that it was happening and that's why i wrote the book and my second book was set in the ivory coast and that deals with the province of child slavery in modern day chocolate production so lots of fun light wreaths not really what i write my next book is set in indonesia has two hundred fifty million people and it only has seven hundred psychiatry ists for the whole country so there's a centrally no support for people with mental health issues and the solution traditionally is a practice called pa sangma which is essentially locking people up or shackling them in place until they get better which of course is totally not acceptable and crazy and that is what my next book is about because i'd like to bring these issues to light that's the kind of thing i write about so basically people ask sometimes like how do you get through writing a full book and i say well it has to be something that either makes you really super happy or really super unhappy because otherwise you're just not going to get through the amount of work that it takes to finish a book or whatever it says about me as a person i write about things that make me super unhappy what type of books your i so i like to write all kinds of books my books are contemporary and realistic i write funny books and i also write mysteries but they're all about kids in this world that this time dealing with real kid problems how long does it take to write a book that's a really good question for me it takes me about six months to do a rough draft and then i take about a year and a half doing edits with my editor so it takes eighteen months total and then it takes another six months before it's on shelves so two years from the time i start a b and till it shows up in a bookstore oh ok what is your next book going to be so i have two books that are going to be coming out in two thousand and eighteen one of them is actually my very first picture book and it's called captain's log snowbound and it's about a kid with a really big imagination and he gets home from school at a really big snowstorm and then the other one that's coming out in april we're going to read right now it doesn't have a title but it's about an eighth grade girl who is failing her classes because she's more interested in making movies than doing her schoolwork ok thank you so much thank you so i made my first book in one thousand nine hundred seven so that was even the way before you guys were born but i've been drawn since i was old enough to hold a crayon and not stick to my year or something do you like drawing or writing better it's a good question i've been drawing room longer than i've been in writing so i could probably draw a longer like i'm working on the graphic novel now i could probably draw for twelve hours but if i was writing for twelve hours my head might what's your favorite thing to do you know i still like sports so you know watching or playing i select a shoot some hoops with my kids oh and you know do school visits i really like hanging out like we did the of flip through the pages mainly so i like to make books that i wish i had when i was your age so that i could get you guys three because i wished i had been a reader so i'm kind of catching up on a lot of stuff now because it was  low riders in space and the writers to the center of the earth i've drawn a few issues of sponge bob comics and i was just in an anthology called boys are no guys read but this year i'm going to be working on two new graphic novels so the list is going to grow and grow hopefully as as long as your arm one of these days that sounds very cool how to books have you started but never got around to finish well when i was a young man i would just like start a drawing and never finish it and if if if i was to really go into that in detail we might be here all day  you look closely you'll notice there's a gold medal on it yeah that's the put up belt for award which i was given to the book by it afforded me and the american library association once we got that award the book the first  printing immediately sold out so i'm thinking that this one might be the most popular book we've created so far while i am in shock that is amazing well i really like writing poetry i've been writing poetry for years and so this collection took me about five years to write over time i didn't set out to write one but when i had so many together i submitted it to a publisher when you grew didn't plan on being an author i always loved writing and i always loved drawing and i did want to be one but after a while i was worried that maybe i wouldn't be good enough and i put off writing for a long time and i started doing it as an adult so i try to tell kids that if you're interested in writing you should pursue it how do you feel about children's novels i love children's novels that's actually what i spend most of my time writing i just don't have my own book published yet i'm trying to get it published i have two books that i've written that are like books that you could read or you could read one is about a girl who's is her father is getting remarried and he has the most new wife has the most annoying step brother so she wishes him away and winds up he winds up in a comic book and she has to go to the ends of the comic book to save him so there's a lot of fun to write and another one is about a kid who struggles in school so to sounds like i might have some inspiration for that how much books have you wrote so far you know what i've been writing seriously for about ten years and i've written about a manuscript a year but a lot of them i think were practiced manuscripts i had to learn the process of writing and so i would say probably about ten what is your favorite out of all these books well i have many many books here one is the rock and the river which is my very first novel and it's about teenagers in the one nine hundred sixty s and the civil rights movement and another book here called cammo girl which is about contemporary sixth grade girl who is trying to find friends and fit in and this is the second book in my robin hood limb series in which robin hood is reimagined as a biracial teenage girl living in a city and so i love all these books and they're very special to me for different reasons but this one is the newest one so i'm really excited to have it here and i love purple it's my favorite color so i'm really excited about that too what is your favorite book that you haven't written my favorite book that someone else wrote is called roll of thunder hear my cry and it's by mildred detailer and it's a historical novel that was one of my inspirations when i was writing the rack in the river because i wanted to sort of try to create the experience that i had reading roll of thunder hear my cry when i was in seventh grade i want kids who read the rack in the ever to feel the same way about that book in terms of the way that it opens their eyes to a different kind of history that they didn't know about that was the experience i had reading roll of thunder in seventh grade and i hope that the seventh graders or other kids who read my rack in the river will have that same feeling son or something because it kind of looks like that well if you're wealthy enough to be having your portrait painted as a kid i mean if you if you're having your portrait painted that means you are from a pretty wealthy family so these are all pretty wealthy boys but yeah this is how they dress their boys and girls they were wearing corsets and headgear and uncomfortable everything but once they got to be seven or eight years old they'd start to wear pants they call it getting breached how do you even poop in armor ok so the question is how do you go to the bathroom in a suit of armor most armor did come with trap doors and buckles and things like that but if you're up on your horse and people are trying to you know you're in the middle of a battle and people are trying to cut off your head you're not going to get down off your horse unbuckled behind a tree here we have a picture so you're just going to kind of go inside your armor and it would be the job of your squier like a kid during to clean the armor after the battle that's very discus anything else disgusting should we should talk about oh how about my new book this one is coming out in september and it's how people have poisoned one another from ancient times to the present so ask me thing you want about poison is poison bad for like other animals well this is i actually there are a lot of venomous animals and there are of course people who have been poisoned accidentally by you know by poison event in his jellyfish or a snake or something but this is how people have unpurchased poisoned one another so is like socrates and hemlock and there's the border just family which they lived in the renaissance time and they were supposedly they poisoned a lot of people just to get sort of more power so there's a lot of there's a lot of kind of nefarious poisoners in history but then sometimes you're just not sure because poisoners don't advertise if you're good poison or people don't know that you're a poison or a because you're good at your job you're like yeah exactly it's like it's like a spy i mean you're not going to be like writing your memoir about what a great spy you were right  so well after actually have nothing to add on to let me like history good well i hope this these are my i like to write history for kids so that you know stuff that i think is interesting and hopefully they will too or like young readers yeah although i think i must be a young reader deep down because i think it's pretty cool to very interesting and thanks laurie goldstein that's it that's great all right what was your first first book that you've ever written first book i ever wrote is not becoming thin which is the first book that was published but it was an adult book about a guy who gets carjacked at a fast food drive through but that is not yet been published one day i hope to go back to it but that was the very first book i wrote all right well who's the first book you actually like finished and it's published written it's one minute that i can't say because it has been published yet although if i call that my favorite then i'm cheating on these books i really can't call a favorite you know it's like it's like your mom wouldn't say your favorite child right genie and it's exactly