Every time I read a book, I end up savoring particular lines and storylines. That happened again when I re-read “Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates,” even though it’s a fantasy I actually wrote with my granddaughter, Hannah Schifrin. I especially  liked the notion...

I’m happy to present this guest post by Nancy Fox:

I was 16 when I met a skinny guy named Woody in suburban New York.

We ate pizza together.

Later, when I got back home in Detroit, he wrote letters to me. Letters and letters and more letters.

In one of them, he invited me to visit him at his Ivy League-type college. I went.

We fell in love. We got married.

But I didn’t know he’d get old, stop being skinny and still stay lovingly by my side for a lifetime (while I, of course, stayed absolutely just as young and every bit as skinny as I’d been my teens).

I’m happy to present this guest post by Callie Raab:

Years ago I wrote a children’s song about fantastical creatures having a race that included the lyric, “Some had eyes on their fingers and toes, a horn on their chin, or a tail on their nose.” They were such fun to draw that when I set about writing stories to help my dyslexic godson learn to read, I thought, “Why not create a whole world of bizarre flora and fauna?” Perhaps at the back of my mind were the fabulous critters that had piqued my childhood imagination in “If I Ran the Zoo” and other Dr. Seuss books.

Despite “Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates” being a fantasy, it contains multiple parallels with the writers’ real lives. Consider, for example, when Lily and Grampy hurry to a pizza parlor where Lily and her bff, Penny, overstuff themselves “so much they had to use...

Where’d the idea for “Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates” come from? Well, the mental magic actually started way back when, but without a single hocus-pocus, scepter or flying carpet. No magical tools whatsoever, in fact, just imagination. When was the “when”? Oh,...

Most writers create characters based on themselves and folks they know. And that’s exactly what Hannah Schifrin and I, Woody Weingarten, her granddad, did. Hannah decided that we’d write about me as Grandpa Graybeard, described in Part One: Mid-Spring of “Grampy and...

"Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates" is an imaginative story that kids can read to themselves — silently or aloud — or enjoy while parents, grandparents and/or great-grandparents  read to them. Indeed, children from 6 to 10 are likely to enjoy anyone reading it to...

I'm happy to present this guest blog by Hannah Schifrin: Most of the scenes I came up with for “Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates” when I was 8 were a lot of fun to write. They just popped into my head. So did the names Fairyzona and Fairyville. My favorite scene is...

Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night, to borrow a phrase, can stop my writing.  Nor can the coronavirus.  Although Covid-19 has caused a major delay in the publication of "MysteryDates," which may not find its audience for another year or so, it won't be able to...