Books Are Awesome -- Fact and Store!

I recently was asked by the Books Are Awesome Bookstore if they could interview me. The granddaughter of one of the owners loved my Little Honker series and wanted to know more about me. We had to do the interview online and for this blog, I decided to discussed the interview and my new book.
Margie Surprises Doc is a sequel to Glasses for Margie. When Glasses came out, everyone said I needed a sequel. It took me a long time to be able to figure it out and then I read about the opossum and I knew what to do.
I decided to break up my actual interview into a few parts. Because it took me a long time to figure out how to do the sequel, I will start with the first question Books Are Awesome asked me.
How long does it take to write a book like one of your Little Honker series?
With any book, it just depends. Sometimes an idea sits in a folder for a long time before I figure out how to attack the story. That was certainly the case with the second Margie book. Saves the Day and Winter Concert started as picture books and I was with another company who closed their doors and left me out in the cold with a loss of money. I found Bublish and the CEO thought those books should be early reader books, so I rewrote them. I can say that because I had to rewrite the books for a different audience, they took me a while to write. I was able to use the basic idea, but had to add events to make the books early readers. So, I guess those two books took me over a year to write. I had to find a new illustrator as well and that took a huge amount of time.
Stay tuned! More of the interview to come.