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.  

Picture books for children take a long time to go from idea to object. When I wrote "Why Are the Ice Caps Melting? The Dangers of Global Warming" five or six years ago being “Green” was not the big subject it is today. But by the time the book came out former Vice-President Al Gore had written "An Inconvenient Truth," and won an Oscar for the documentary film of the subject. Leonardo di Caprio had (I believe) 6 Prius cars in his garage. Hollywood had spoken. Green was good.

I was surprised that this modest little book, published by HarperCollins as part of its LET’S READ AND FIND OUT science series, and cheerfully illustrated by Paul Meisel, gathered the attention it did, although I guess I shouldn’t have been. A reporter from The Washington Post interviewed me and asked if I didn’t feel concerned about how I was frightening children by writing a book about global warming. The Wall Street Journal (which rarely reviews children’s books) wrote a long and vitriolic review of the book, with a similar caveat.

I’m calling my blog THE LADY HERMES. No, it’s not one that will link to eBay where you can buy Hermes (the high status one pronounced air-mez) knockoffs cheap. If you read my book "The Robber Baby and Other Greek Myths," you’ll find that the robber baby is the god Hermes, messenger of Zeus, but also the god of secrets, lies and dreams—in other words, the god of storytelling. But he’s also the god who watches over travelers (and I am one of those), and the one who invented the alphabet, therefore the god of reading and writing (another passion of mine). So as an author and illustrator of books for children, he seemed a good mentor.