At last...I’ve finished The Green Ghost. For a long time I had difficulty pulling it together, because the story is made up of two different stories, one set in the past in which the girl who will be the ghost in the second part dies and the second one set in the present when a modern girl meets the ghost.

I finally showed what I had to the editor, Jennifer Arena, at Random House, Stepping Stones, knowing that the story wasn’t working yet. She read it, thought about it, and suggested that I intersperse the chapters of the two stories. That worked! In fact, the chapters fell together as though they had been written that way to start with.

She and I passed the manuscript back and forth a couple more times, and it is now ready to go to the copy editor...barely ahead of the deadline.

I’ve also finished Yellowstone and The Badlands for my Wonders of America series at Simon & Schuster. Those books are fun to write.

In fact, the writing itself is easy. What’s not so easy, after gathering a lot of research on the site, is sorting out the points I want to make about each incredible place in the two hundred words I have to work with.

more >>