Christine Packler. Thanks so much for coming today. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. So Lola, I adore. She is so sweet and funny. Tell us about her character and how did you come up with such a great character. Well first of all, thank you. I was standing at the bus stop with my daughter and she was in second grade. It was a while ago. She's in high school now. And she asked if we could do something to go green because I think it was Earth Day at school. So I thought let's walk to school. Let's not take the bus and let's walk to school. And this is back in the day when she thought I had all the answers. Those sweet days. You know those sweet days and I knew what I was doing. So we started walking to school and it started to rain. By the time we got to school, she was late. So I apologized, sent her on her way and then as I was walking home I thought she's the last one to get to school today. But what if you were always last? You'd have to learn to make the best of it. And as character Lola Zuckerman popped into my head, I thought if you were Z in the alphabet, you'd always have to go last. And so when I got home after I changed my soaking wet clothes, I sat down and I started to write the first Lola story. And that's how it started. Tell us about writing for a series as opposed to a standalone novel. Did you know at that point that it would you wanted to do a series? No, I didn't actually. But I wrote the first story and then I think I set it aside and another thing happened at school. My daughter was going on a field trip and so I decided to take her experience but give it to Lola and write another story. And so by the time I actually sent the manuscript out to a publisher, I had written three stories. And mostly because I was inspired by things going on at my daughter's school. And was it really fun to be in Lola's point of view? It was so wonderful. I love being in her point of view because I'm sort of a daydreamy quiet person but she's very loud and opinionated and she says what she thinks. So it's wonderful to slip into her shoes and feel what that's like. A little bit of wish fulfillment. Exactly. Talking in all caps. I love it. What would be your top advice the people who want to write the children? I think the first thing I would recommend is to go to the library and go up to the children's section and start reading and read what is being published now. Not just what you read when you were a child. Although I think that's important too. Right. But read what kids are reading nowadays. And then the second thing is to just sit down every day and write. Yes. Bum and chair. Yes. Yes. Bum and chair. One of my friends and mentors is Patricia Riley Giff. And she said just write two pages. I know some people are doing this November. This Nano Rhymo. Nano Rhymo. So that's a lot more pages. But for a regular month of writing, if you sit down and write two pages, I mean by the end of the month you have what? Yes. 60 pages. We're not mathematicians. No. We can't work that out. We have we've got some pages. We go. Yeah. I think that rather than thinking about writing a series, I would recommend for the first time author, even though it happened to me, I think it's better to think about the first story you want to tell. Write that first story and then send it out. Yes. Yeah. That makes good sense. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, Christine, thank you so much for coming today. Thank you.