The one that’s coming out in the fall is called Eve of the Emperor Penguin. I have to say that kids have navigated this whole series. When I’m on a book tour, which I do at least once a year, I get kids to vote on ideas that I’m thinking about. I come off that tour and I always know what my next few books will be.
A couple of years ago — I think maybe because of March of the Penguins, the movie — every child I met was advocating for a penguin book. Based on that, I started my research and Eve of the Emperor Penguin will be next. I didn’t necessarily have children all over the world telling me to do Mozart, but I wanted to do Mozart.
I figured out a way to — as I did with Shakespeare — I didn’t call it Shakespeare, I called it Stage Fright on a Summer Night, so that children who could relate to stage fright would be sort of tricked in to getting to know Shakespeare. But with Mozart I call it Moonlight on the Magic Flute, because that sounds sort of mysterious.
I’ve got a lot of votes for that title without children really knowing what it was about. I’ll get title ideas confirmed as well as subject ideas when I do my little surveys. Now the interesting thing is on a recent tour, I kept getting huge reactions to one word; and this word would get more reaction than any other word I put out there — pandas.
I don’t know why, but it was universal — even among the Navajo children I just visited. Definitely I’m starting now to gather information on panda bears and we’ll work that in down the road. It’s so fun because it’s constantly weighing what children want against my own interest and it’s great when they coincide.
What I’ll do is I’ll say, “Now we’re going to do a vote because there are a lot of you here; and I’ll say an idea and everyone vote if they love the idea and just don’t raise your hand if you don’t love it. But when you come up to me, if you have an idea I haven’t mentioned, just let me know real fast.”
I get hundreds of pieces of paper with little ideas written on them and little titles written on them. It provokes in children ideas of where they’d like to go, what they’d like to read about. So I think it’s a fun give and take. It’s always worked that way. If all the children and I suddenly run out of ideas — we’ll stop.
But until then, I think, as long as I’m healthy and in my right mind I’ll just keep going with the whole series. It’s so much fun. I would say it’s more fun now than ever.
