Here's a picture of my grandson Nigel at the President Obama inauguration, taken by his mother, Lizzy Rockwell.

He looks cold, doesn't he? I figure he'll always remember how cold George Washington and his less well-layered troops were that first winter in Valley Forge.

Some books take a mighty long time between the flash of an idea and the finished book.  If I count the first moment of the idea, ”Big George” (January 1, 2009, Harcourt/Houghton) has been 10 years in the coming.  Or more.

I live in Revolutionary War country, and one day I offered to take my grandson, Nigel, who was five or six at the time, to a house George Washington may or may not have stopped in – or at least one General Israel Putnam, our local hero, had.  He told me he wasn’t interested in things “ancient like George Washington,” adding that I probably was because I was so ancient.  I didn’t dare admit to him that I never had been very interested in George Washington myself.  As far as I knew, there was nothing to know about him except that he was “The Father of Our Country” and the face on the dollar bill.  He simply WAS and that was enough.  That day I began reading up on him.

To find out about the remarkable and surprising man I discovered, you’ll have to read “Big George; How a Shy Boy Became President Washington.”  The story took seven years from the first words typed by me to being the handsome book illustrated by Matt Phelan and published January 1, 2009.  

I get lots of inquiries on illustrating books for children. I try and answer them as best I can but every question has its own answer. Some years ago a painter friend of mine commented that she probably should switch gears and try illustrating books (which she obviously thought easy to achieve success in, since I had).  At that point I was finishing up some corrections on a book and asked if we could discuss the ins and outs of illustrating in a week when I’d be done and out from under the time pressure. My friend looked at me in horror and said “You mean you actually change your artwork when people tell you to?”

I'm amused that people who see the cover art by my daughter Lizzy Rockwell for our most recent collaboration, "Presidents' Day" assume that the boy and girl on the cover (dressed as Abraham Lincoln and George Washington) are intended to be Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Not so. The book was written and illustrated and delivered to the publisher long before we knew that our first major African-American contender for president would be running against our most formidable woman candidate in the Democrat primaries.