I grew up in a small town in northern Indiana much like Lake Haven, the fictional town in TALL TALES. In the stories I wrote when I was younger, I often had my characters live in cities or other parts of the country. But as I got older I began to realize that I needed to set my novels in places that I knew. And I know all about cornfields and Lake Michigan.

Like most writers, I've been writing since I was really young. I wrote my first short story in fourth grade. My teacher handed out magazine pages that she'd clipped. She told us to take our page home and make up a story about what we thought was happening in the picture. I spent a lot of time on this assignment. I loved it. My teacher liked my story so much that she had me read it in front of the class. I even tried to get the story published in Highlights magazine but it was rejected. My first rejection at age 9!

From that day on, I knew I wanted to be a writer. So I wrote. And wrote. I wrote stories. I wrote in a journal (and I still write in one). When I got older I wrote for school newspapers and then our town paper. I wrote my first novel when I was 16. It was a very melodramatic story about a 16-year-old girl named Jamie, and it was 200 pages long. I sent it to several publishers in New York, but they rejected it.

I studied journalism in college, and when I graduated I moved to the East coast and wrote for newspapers and magazines. I wrote articles about health and fitness and the local zoo and anything else you can imagine. I did the last interview with tennis great Arthur Ashe before he died. I traveled and met lots of interesting people, but I still wanted to write fiction.

So I got down to writing full time in 1999 and the next year finished a draft of TALL TALES. It went through dozens and dozens of revisions and rejections before Wendy Lamb (Random House) bought it in 2005. And then I revised it even more! I started NO CREAM PUFFS in 2003. It also went through dozens of revisions. At one point I struggled so much with it that I wrote an entire draft without one of the main characters, Huey. But I missed him so much and the writing felt so flat that I went back to the beginning and rewrote, again, this time inserting Huey much more into the story. Now I can't imagine the novel without him in it.

Every day I wake up at 5:30, make a cup of coffee and start writing in an old closet on the third floor of our house. I've held a lot of jobs over the years. I started a dog walking business in downtown Chicago. I strung tennis racquets. I worked as a newspaper reporter. I taught writing at several colleges. Now I have two jobs. I take care of my three kids (I also have a husband and we live just outside Boston) and I write middle grade fiction. I think these are the two best jobs I've ever had.