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Ellray Jakes the Dragon Slayer

Part of EllRay Jakes

Illustrated by Brian Biggs
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Paperback
$6.99 US
5.06"W x 6.63"H x 0.38"D   (12.9 x 16.8 x 1.0 cm) | 4 oz (113 g) | 92 per carton
On sale May 16, 2013 | 144 Pages | 9780142423585
Age 6-8 years | Grades 1-3
Reading Level: Lexile 760L
Sales rights: US, Canada, Open Mkt
EllRay Jakes is a small kid with big problems!

EllRay Jakes may be the smallest kid in his class at Oak Glen Primary School, but he’s also his sister Alfie’s big brother. So when it looks like Alfie is being bossed around by a dragon-like girl at her school, EllRay feels responsible. As her older (and wiser!) brother, shouldn’t he show her that she should stand up for herself? 

But little sisters and four year old dragons are a bit more complicated than he thought. . . . 

Check out the other books in the EllRay Jakes series: EllRay Jakes Is Not A Chicken!, EllRay Jakes is a Rock Star!, and EllRay Jakes Walks the Plank!

OTHER BOOKS ABOUT ELLRAY JAKES

EllRay Jakes Is Not a Chicken!

EllRay Jakes Is a Rock Star!

EllRay Jakes Walks the Plank!

1

THAT HOPEFUL LOOK

“Are you paying any attention to me at all, EllRay Jakes?” Mom asks from the driver’s seat of our car, a Toyota so old they don’t even make them anymore. It’s the middle of April, and we are waiting in a humming line of cars in front of my little sister’s day care.

“Wait. Yeah,” I say, pushing Pause on Die, Creature, Die, my favorite handheld video game. I am almost at Level Six. “What?”

“I was saying, go inside and sign Alfie out,” Mom says. “And tell her to hurry, please. I’m afraid to turn the engine off. Darn car battery,” she adds. I can see the scowl on her face in the rearview mirror. “I have to call the auto club when we get home,” she says. “If we can make it home without having to be towed.”

“Do I have to get Alfie?” I ask, matching Mom’s scowl with one of my own. “I had a sore throat yesterday. And last time you sent me in there, the little kids made me judge a contest out on the playground. Remember?”

Picture a combination of preschool versions of a TV singing contest and a wrestling match and you’ll be close. It was terrible. One kid bit his best friend.

I’m working that sore throat, by the way. It’s the reason I didn’t walk home from school. Now, of course, I wish I had.

“You have to,” Mom tells me, inching our car forward as the line moves. “She’s not standing by the front door, naturally. Not our Alfie. That would be too easy. She’ll be out back with her friends.”

And she REVS the engine a little, as if reminding it what it’s supposed to do.

Kreative Learning and Playtime Day Care is very strict about letting its little kids leave. They either have to be waiting right next to the front door, so the frazzled teacher with the clipboard can check off their names and then watch them go straight out to their car, or you have to walk all the way in and find the right little kid yourself. And then you have to sign them out, but only if you’re on the approved list. That means parking the car, though, not waiting in line at the curb. And today, my mom’s afraid to turn off our car.

When I grow up, I want to be so rich that I can buy a new car every time I get close to needing a new battery. Car batteries are boring things to buy.

“EllRay. Move,” Mom says, her voice growing sharp.

And my mom is usually a very quiet lady.

“Okay, okay,” I say, turning off my game and sliding it under my backpack so no bad guy can leap into the car and steal it when I’m gone.

It’s my favorite thing!

“And make sure Alfie doesn’t forget her new pink jacket,” Mom tells me.

“She hasn’t taken it off in three days,” I remind her as I wrestle myself out of my seat belt. “I don’t see how she could forget it.”

And into Kreative Learning and Day Care I go.

I can’t see Alfie anywhere in the main playroom— naturally, like my mom said. So I head out back. The whole rear play area is more like a giant cage with a fence around it than it is a playground, only there are so many fun things to do there that the kids don’t notice.

I was hoping my sister would be in the covered patio where the battered playhouse and most of the girls are, but oh, no. And Alfie isn’t on the slide or the swings, either. Those are pretty much being swarmed by leftover day care boys, including the kid who bit his friend that other time. A second teacher is trying to keep the boys from clogging up the slide. “One at a time!” she keeps calling out.

There’s a job I never want to have.

“Alfie!” I call out, but she doesn’t answer.

I search the playground with my LASER-BEAM EYES, the ones I use to score so high in Die, Creature, Die. And there she is with three other girls, over in the far corner of the yard, of course, by the tree, the bush, and the rabbit hutch. Alfie’s golden-brown face has a funny expression on it.

I start to yell for her again, so I won’t have to walk all the way over there to get her, but then I stop to watch, because I can’t figure out what’s going on. At first, it looks like all four girls are playing together. But then I see that it’s really three girls who are together, with Alfie on the side, near the hutch. It reminds me of when my mom says, “Dressing on the side, please,” when she’s ordering salad in a restaurant.

The tallest of the three clumped-together girls is Suzette Monahan, who is a real pain, in my opinion, even though Alfie thinks she’s so great. Suzette came over to our house one day, and my mom’s still talking about it.

To say that Suzette is used to getting her own way is putting it mildly.

Today, Suzette has a long arm slung over each of the other two girls’ necks. Alfie is turned away from them, staring down at the ground. Her shoulders are slumped. She’s kicking at the dirt like that’s the most interesting thing in the world to do, and some stuff goes flying through the air.

And I suddenly remember my old nursery school in San Diego, and the rabbit hutch we had there, and Fuzz-Bunny, who was so kicky and grouchy that no one could even go near him. Hutches use heavy screens instead of regular hard floors on the bottom, so the rabbit poop—little pellets—just drops down onto the ground, where it’s easy for teachers to rake it up. Rabbits’ tidy poop is probably the only reason they are such popular day-care pets.

You’re not supposed to play with the pellets, though. Or even kick them around.

And Alfie is usually so easily grossed-out. What’s the deal?

One of the girls who has Suzette’s arm hooked around her neck has a fluffy halo of brown hair. She reaches out toward Alfie, and she starts to say something. Alfie turns around. I know that hopeful look on her face, too—like it’s been raining all Saturday, but the sun just came out.

But then Suzette yanks away the reaching-out girl, and she whirls both girls around like the three of them are on some lame carnival ride.

And Alfie is left just standing there.

Her smile goes behind a cloud. Even her new pink jacket looks sad.

“Rabbit poop girl,” Suzette cries, tossing the mean words over her shoulder like a Die, Creature, Die grenade. “Stupid pink jacket,” she shouts, piling on the insults. “Poop jacket!” she adds. Then she starts to haul her two captives away.

And these are Alfie’s friends?

“Hey, Alfie,” I call out as loud as I can, making sure the other girls can hear me. “Mom’s waiting out front for us. And we’re gonna do something really, really fun! With ice cream at the end of it! After we go shopping for dolls!” I add, inspired.

There. That ought to get ’em.

“EllWay!” Alfie shouts. And she starts running across the playground like she’s never been so happy to see anyone in her whole life.

We’re only talking four years so far, but still.

I am going to have some explaining to do about fun, ice cream, and dolls once Alfie and I are buckled into our sputtering car. But it’ll be worth it, seeing the look that’s pasted on Suzette Monahan’s mean little face right now.

She’s jealous! Good.

But what is going on here at Kreative Learning and Playtime Day Care?

Probably nothing, I tell myself as Alfie throws her arms around me, giving me a surprisingly strong hug. Most likely, it was just some stupid game they were playing.

They were just having fun. Weird girl-fun, but fun. Weren’t they?

And I put the whole thing in another part of my mind as I sign out Alfie and we head for the car.

Level Six, here I come!

2

TACO NIGHT

“What’s up with Alfie?” I ask my mom a week later, after a perfect dinner of tacos, tacos, and more tacos. This happened because tonight was Taco Night, a popular new tradition on Wednesdays in my family. And then we had applesauce. It is my turn to help with the dishes, but instead of Alfie sticking around and pestering Mom and me, like she usually does, she has slumped off to her bedroom like a sad little comma with a dark cloud over its head.

My third grade teacher Ms. Sanchez said today that commas are our friends, because they break up long sentences and make them easier to understand. But I’m a short sentence guy.

I’m eight years old, and we live in Oak Glen, California. I go to Oak Glen Primary School, and as you already know, Alfie goes to Kreative Learning and Playtime Day Care, “featuring computer skills and potty training,” my dad always likes to read from the big sign out front. He has almost stopped complaining about how they spelled “creative” wrong, because what’s the point?

They must think it’s cute, Mom says.

Alfie goes to day care because Dad teaches about rocks in a San Diego college all day, and my mom writes fantasy books for grown-up ladies.

That fantasy book thing is why Alfie and I have such unusual—okay, WEIRD—names, by the way. “Alfie” is short for “Alfleta,” which means “beautiful elf” in some ancient language hardly anyone speaks anymore. And I’ll tell you about my name some other time. Maybe.

PRAISE FOR THE ELLRAY JAKES SERIES:

“Warner is a dead-on observer of playground politics, and has a great ear for dialogue.” —School Library Journal on EllRay Jakes Is Not a Chicken!

“…ideal for reluctant readers.” —Booklist on EllRay Jakes Is Not a Chicken!

“Young readers can identify with EllRay, who is neither a bad seed nor a goody-two-shoes; he and his sense of humor are just right.” —Kirkus Reviews on EllRay Jakes Is a Rock Star!

“The EllRay Jakes stories are just right for his real-life peers.”—Kirkus Reviews on EllRay Jakes Walks the Plank

“For me, completing a novel is like putting the last piece of a puzzle into place. What could be more rewarding?”—Sally Warner

Sally Warner lives in Pasadena, California. She also spends time at the beach and on a farm in the Adirondacks in upstate New York, where she continues to write and work on her art.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Growing Up

Although I have worked most of my life as a visual artist, and only started to write fiction in the last few years, I think I can trace my beginnings as a novelist to my childhood. My family moved from Connecticut to California when I was eight, and shortly after that I began a secret formal ritual: every year, I would tell myself a story. In retrospect, each story was amazingly detailed and complete—which is not surprising, as it might easily have taken me two or three months to invent. My romantic stories, sometimes vaguely historical, usually centered around a fascinating young girl. She was often misunderstood, but always beautiful! I liked the imaginary lives I created, but what pleased me most was the storytelling process itself. I lost myself in it.

During all those years, though, I never wrote any of my stories down. In fact, I made no connection between what I was doing and “real” storytelling; for me, it was simply something that pleased me, something to keep private.

I always read like crazy, hurrying home from the library each week with my six agonizingly chosen books. As the saying goes, I read everything I could get my hands on, even going so far as to turn in an earnest fourth-grade book report on a naughty “career gals in New York” potboiler I stumbled across. I highly recommended it; my teacher was appalled.

How I Became a Writer

After teaching art education in college for ten years, and working on my own art, I decided that I wanted to write as well. I started with nonfiction. My first two art project books for adults helped me learn to put words together with some clarity and color. My third nonfiction book for adults was made up of interviews and my own observations, and it was more of a writing challenge.

Only then did I start to write for children; you might say I worked my way up to it. I had always admired and collected children’s books, and I used them in my teaching whenever possible. Since I am a visual artist, friends had expected me to illustrate picture books someday. I love writing, though, and decided to concentrate on that. I find writing for children to be the ultimate storytelling challenge.

It was a big leap moving from nonfiction to fiction. Unagented, I was lucky enough to receive generous editorial feedback from two people at the very start, and I was smart enough to listen to it. This was the start of my crash course in fiction writing.

But the biggest breakthrough for me as a writer came when I started letting a story develop naturally, if sometimes uncomfortably, rather than forcing it to conform to a preconceived plan. In other words, I reverted in some basic way to my childhood storytelling methods.

For me, completing a novel is like putting the last piece of a puzzle into place. What could be more rewarding?

My Books

My first children’s novels take place in Philadelphia, a city I used to visit for a couple of months each year. Dog Years was inspired by my own childhood musings about time, having been a kid who once thought she might die of old age in the sixth grade. And when I read a few years ago that there were 1.5 million people in U.S. prisons, I started to think about the children of those prisoners. Along came Case Hill—my first protagonist—a school cartoonist, as I once had been.

Case’s buddy Ned is the focus of Some Friend, which explores the nature of friendship, and their mutual friend Ellie Lane is the star of Ellie and the Bunheads, a book about what it is like to be a ballet dancer—or to work hard as a young person in any of the arts, really. Ellie and the Bunheads comes directly from my younger son’s experience as a serious dance student: he is a professional now, currently with the Pittsburgh Ballet. My oldest son graduated from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and currently teaches and works in computer animation.

Where I Live

Most of the time, I live and work in a small Craftsman bungalow in Pasadena, California. I write and draw in different places: my writing room is inside the house, while my art studio is a converted one-car garage in the backyard.

There is a redwood tree in my front yard and lots of wildlife. Birds are everywhere, even hawks, wild parrots, and a California scrub jay I raised, taught to fly, and released. I have two cats, the ancient but still flirtatious Domino and her elderly son Flopsy.

My work is divided between visual art and writing. In the studio, I work on charcoal drawings—most recently of very old toys, each one brimming with lost stories. And when I write, the colors and shadows in my stories fill my mind.

It seems as though the boundaries between my art and my writing are starting to disappear! I look forward to turning the page and seeing what happens next. . . .


PRAISE

SWEET & SOUR LILY
“Lily’s humorous first-person narrative will have great appeal for young children—a charming chapter book that should be a popular choice for reading aloud.”—Booklist


SORT OF FOREVER
“The talented Warner has previously explored the themes of friendship and change, but never more powerfully or affectingly than this piercing novel.”—Starred, Publishers Weekly
View titles by Sally Warner
Brian Biggs was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He currently makes illustrations for books, posters, puzzles, and games in an old garage in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Visit his website at www.mrbiggs.com.  View titles by Brian Biggs
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About

EllRay Jakes is a small kid with big problems!

EllRay Jakes may be the smallest kid in his class at Oak Glen Primary School, but he’s also his sister Alfie’s big brother. So when it looks like Alfie is being bossed around by a dragon-like girl at her school, EllRay feels responsible. As her older (and wiser!) brother, shouldn’t he show her that she should stand up for herself? 

But little sisters and four year old dragons are a bit more complicated than he thought. . . . 

Check out the other books in the EllRay Jakes series: EllRay Jakes Is Not A Chicken!, EllRay Jakes is a Rock Star!, and EllRay Jakes Walks the Plank!

Excerpt

OTHER BOOKS ABOUT ELLRAY JAKES

EllRay Jakes Is Not a Chicken!

EllRay Jakes Is a Rock Star!

EllRay Jakes Walks the Plank!

1

THAT HOPEFUL LOOK

“Are you paying any attention to me at all, EllRay Jakes?” Mom asks from the driver’s seat of our car, a Toyota so old they don’t even make them anymore. It’s the middle of April, and we are waiting in a humming line of cars in front of my little sister’s day care.

“Wait. Yeah,” I say, pushing Pause on Die, Creature, Die, my favorite handheld video game. I am almost at Level Six. “What?”

“I was saying, go inside and sign Alfie out,” Mom says. “And tell her to hurry, please. I’m afraid to turn the engine off. Darn car battery,” she adds. I can see the scowl on her face in the rearview mirror. “I have to call the auto club when we get home,” she says. “If we can make it home without having to be towed.”

“Do I have to get Alfie?” I ask, matching Mom’s scowl with one of my own. “I had a sore throat yesterday. And last time you sent me in there, the little kids made me judge a contest out on the playground. Remember?”

Picture a combination of preschool versions of a TV singing contest and a wrestling match and you’ll be close. It was terrible. One kid bit his best friend.

I’m working that sore throat, by the way. It’s the reason I didn’t walk home from school. Now, of course, I wish I had.

“You have to,” Mom tells me, inching our car forward as the line moves. “She’s not standing by the front door, naturally. Not our Alfie. That would be too easy. She’ll be out back with her friends.”

And she REVS the engine a little, as if reminding it what it’s supposed to do.

Kreative Learning and Playtime Day Care is very strict about letting its little kids leave. They either have to be waiting right next to the front door, so the frazzled teacher with the clipboard can check off their names and then watch them go straight out to their car, or you have to walk all the way in and find the right little kid yourself. And then you have to sign them out, but only if you’re on the approved list. That means parking the car, though, not waiting in line at the curb. And today, my mom’s afraid to turn off our car.

When I grow up, I want to be so rich that I can buy a new car every time I get close to needing a new battery. Car batteries are boring things to buy.

“EllRay. Move,” Mom says, her voice growing sharp.

And my mom is usually a very quiet lady.

“Okay, okay,” I say, turning off my game and sliding it under my backpack so no bad guy can leap into the car and steal it when I’m gone.

It’s my favorite thing!

“And make sure Alfie doesn’t forget her new pink jacket,” Mom tells me.

“She hasn’t taken it off in three days,” I remind her as I wrestle myself out of my seat belt. “I don’t see how she could forget it.”

And into Kreative Learning and Day Care I go.

I can’t see Alfie anywhere in the main playroom— naturally, like my mom said. So I head out back. The whole rear play area is more like a giant cage with a fence around it than it is a playground, only there are so many fun things to do there that the kids don’t notice.

I was hoping my sister would be in the covered patio where the battered playhouse and most of the girls are, but oh, no. And Alfie isn’t on the slide or the swings, either. Those are pretty much being swarmed by leftover day care boys, including the kid who bit his friend that other time. A second teacher is trying to keep the boys from clogging up the slide. “One at a time!” she keeps calling out.

There’s a job I never want to have.

“Alfie!” I call out, but she doesn’t answer.

I search the playground with my LASER-BEAM EYES, the ones I use to score so high in Die, Creature, Die. And there she is with three other girls, over in the far corner of the yard, of course, by the tree, the bush, and the rabbit hutch. Alfie’s golden-brown face has a funny expression on it.

I start to yell for her again, so I won’t have to walk all the way over there to get her, but then I stop to watch, because I can’t figure out what’s going on. At first, it looks like all four girls are playing together. But then I see that it’s really three girls who are together, with Alfie on the side, near the hutch. It reminds me of when my mom says, “Dressing on the side, please,” when she’s ordering salad in a restaurant.

The tallest of the three clumped-together girls is Suzette Monahan, who is a real pain, in my opinion, even though Alfie thinks she’s so great. Suzette came over to our house one day, and my mom’s still talking about it.

To say that Suzette is used to getting her own way is putting it mildly.

Today, Suzette has a long arm slung over each of the other two girls’ necks. Alfie is turned away from them, staring down at the ground. Her shoulders are slumped. She’s kicking at the dirt like that’s the most interesting thing in the world to do, and some stuff goes flying through the air.

And I suddenly remember my old nursery school in San Diego, and the rabbit hutch we had there, and Fuzz-Bunny, who was so kicky and grouchy that no one could even go near him. Hutches use heavy screens instead of regular hard floors on the bottom, so the rabbit poop—little pellets—just drops down onto the ground, where it’s easy for teachers to rake it up. Rabbits’ tidy poop is probably the only reason they are such popular day-care pets.

You’re not supposed to play with the pellets, though. Or even kick them around.

And Alfie is usually so easily grossed-out. What’s the deal?

One of the girls who has Suzette’s arm hooked around her neck has a fluffy halo of brown hair. She reaches out toward Alfie, and she starts to say something. Alfie turns around. I know that hopeful look on her face, too—like it’s been raining all Saturday, but the sun just came out.

But then Suzette yanks away the reaching-out girl, and she whirls both girls around like the three of them are on some lame carnival ride.

And Alfie is left just standing there.

Her smile goes behind a cloud. Even her new pink jacket looks sad.

“Rabbit poop girl,” Suzette cries, tossing the mean words over her shoulder like a Die, Creature, Die grenade. “Stupid pink jacket,” she shouts, piling on the insults. “Poop jacket!” she adds. Then she starts to haul her two captives away.

And these are Alfie’s friends?

“Hey, Alfie,” I call out as loud as I can, making sure the other girls can hear me. “Mom’s waiting out front for us. And we’re gonna do something really, really fun! With ice cream at the end of it! After we go shopping for dolls!” I add, inspired.

There. That ought to get ’em.

“EllWay!” Alfie shouts. And she starts running across the playground like she’s never been so happy to see anyone in her whole life.

We’re only talking four years so far, but still.

I am going to have some explaining to do about fun, ice cream, and dolls once Alfie and I are buckled into our sputtering car. But it’ll be worth it, seeing the look that’s pasted on Suzette Monahan’s mean little face right now.

She’s jealous! Good.

But what is going on here at Kreative Learning and Playtime Day Care?

Probably nothing, I tell myself as Alfie throws her arms around me, giving me a surprisingly strong hug. Most likely, it was just some stupid game they were playing.

They were just having fun. Weird girl-fun, but fun. Weren’t they?

And I put the whole thing in another part of my mind as I sign out Alfie and we head for the car.

Level Six, here I come!

2

TACO NIGHT

“What’s up with Alfie?” I ask my mom a week later, after a perfect dinner of tacos, tacos, and more tacos. This happened because tonight was Taco Night, a popular new tradition on Wednesdays in my family. And then we had applesauce. It is my turn to help with the dishes, but instead of Alfie sticking around and pestering Mom and me, like she usually does, she has slumped off to her bedroom like a sad little comma with a dark cloud over its head.

My third grade teacher Ms. Sanchez said today that commas are our friends, because they break up long sentences and make them easier to understand. But I’m a short sentence guy.

I’m eight years old, and we live in Oak Glen, California. I go to Oak Glen Primary School, and as you already know, Alfie goes to Kreative Learning and Playtime Day Care, “featuring computer skills and potty training,” my dad always likes to read from the big sign out front. He has almost stopped complaining about how they spelled “creative” wrong, because what’s the point?

They must think it’s cute, Mom says.

Alfie goes to day care because Dad teaches about rocks in a San Diego college all day, and my mom writes fantasy books for grown-up ladies.

That fantasy book thing is why Alfie and I have such unusual—okay, WEIRD—names, by the way. “Alfie” is short for “Alfleta,” which means “beautiful elf” in some ancient language hardly anyone speaks anymore. And I’ll tell you about my name some other time. Maybe.

Praise

PRAISE FOR THE ELLRAY JAKES SERIES:

“Warner is a dead-on observer of playground politics, and has a great ear for dialogue.” —School Library Journal on EllRay Jakes Is Not a Chicken!

“…ideal for reluctant readers.” —Booklist on EllRay Jakes Is Not a Chicken!

“Young readers can identify with EllRay, who is neither a bad seed nor a goody-two-shoes; he and his sense of humor are just right.” —Kirkus Reviews on EllRay Jakes Is a Rock Star!

“The EllRay Jakes stories are just right for his real-life peers.”—Kirkus Reviews on EllRay Jakes Walks the Plank

Author

“For me, completing a novel is like putting the last piece of a puzzle into place. What could be more rewarding?”—Sally Warner

Sally Warner lives in Pasadena, California. She also spends time at the beach and on a farm in the Adirondacks in upstate New York, where she continues to write and work on her art.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Growing Up

Although I have worked most of my life as a visual artist, and only started to write fiction in the last few years, I think I can trace my beginnings as a novelist to my childhood. My family moved from Connecticut to California when I was eight, and shortly after that I began a secret formal ritual: every year, I would tell myself a story. In retrospect, each story was amazingly detailed and complete—which is not surprising, as it might easily have taken me two or three months to invent. My romantic stories, sometimes vaguely historical, usually centered around a fascinating young girl. She was often misunderstood, but always beautiful! I liked the imaginary lives I created, but what pleased me most was the storytelling process itself. I lost myself in it.

During all those years, though, I never wrote any of my stories down. In fact, I made no connection between what I was doing and “real” storytelling; for me, it was simply something that pleased me, something to keep private.

I always read like crazy, hurrying home from the library each week with my six agonizingly chosen books. As the saying goes, I read everything I could get my hands on, even going so far as to turn in an earnest fourth-grade book report on a naughty “career gals in New York” potboiler I stumbled across. I highly recommended it; my teacher was appalled.

How I Became a Writer

After teaching art education in college for ten years, and working on my own art, I decided that I wanted to write as well. I started with nonfiction. My first two art project books for adults helped me learn to put words together with some clarity and color. My third nonfiction book for adults was made up of interviews and my own observations, and it was more of a writing challenge.

Only then did I start to write for children; you might say I worked my way up to it. I had always admired and collected children’s books, and I used them in my teaching whenever possible. Since I am a visual artist, friends had expected me to illustrate picture books someday. I love writing, though, and decided to concentrate on that. I find writing for children to be the ultimate storytelling challenge.

It was a big leap moving from nonfiction to fiction. Unagented, I was lucky enough to receive generous editorial feedback from two people at the very start, and I was smart enough to listen to it. This was the start of my crash course in fiction writing.

But the biggest breakthrough for me as a writer came when I started letting a story develop naturally, if sometimes uncomfortably, rather than forcing it to conform to a preconceived plan. In other words, I reverted in some basic way to my childhood storytelling methods.

For me, completing a novel is like putting the last piece of a puzzle into place. What could be more rewarding?

My Books

My first children’s novels take place in Philadelphia, a city I used to visit for a couple of months each year. Dog Years was inspired by my own childhood musings about time, having been a kid who once thought she might die of old age in the sixth grade. And when I read a few years ago that there were 1.5 million people in U.S. prisons, I started to think about the children of those prisoners. Along came Case Hill—my first protagonist—a school cartoonist, as I once had been.

Case’s buddy Ned is the focus of Some Friend, which explores the nature of friendship, and their mutual friend Ellie Lane is the star of Ellie and the Bunheads, a book about what it is like to be a ballet dancer—or to work hard as a young person in any of the arts, really. Ellie and the Bunheads comes directly from my younger son’s experience as a serious dance student: he is a professional now, currently with the Pittsburgh Ballet. My oldest son graduated from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and currently teaches and works in computer animation.

Where I Live

Most of the time, I live and work in a small Craftsman bungalow in Pasadena, California. I write and draw in different places: my writing room is inside the house, while my art studio is a converted one-car garage in the backyard.

There is a redwood tree in my front yard and lots of wildlife. Birds are everywhere, even hawks, wild parrots, and a California scrub jay I raised, taught to fly, and released. I have two cats, the ancient but still flirtatious Domino and her elderly son Flopsy.

My work is divided between visual art and writing. In the studio, I work on charcoal drawings—most recently of very old toys, each one brimming with lost stories. And when I write, the colors and shadows in my stories fill my mind.

It seems as though the boundaries between my art and my writing are starting to disappear! I look forward to turning the page and seeing what happens next. . . .


PRAISE

SWEET & SOUR LILY
“Lily’s humorous first-person narrative will have great appeal for young children—a charming chapter book that should be a popular choice for reading aloud.”—Booklist


SORT OF FOREVER
“The talented Warner has previously explored the themes of friendship and change, but never more powerfully or affectingly than this piercing novel.”—Starred, Publishers Weekly
View titles by Sally Warner
Brian Biggs was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He currently makes illustrations for books, posters, puzzles, and games in an old garage in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Visit his website at www.mrbiggs.com.  View titles by Brian Biggs

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