ABOUT MY BOOK, "The Unlikely Alchemist"

I started writing “The Unlikely Alchemist” in 1984. I was underemployed and sitting at my desk musing. As I pondered, a name popped into my head: Bartholomew Straightwaist Creedance. I smiled and wrote the name down. What kind of a person has a name like that? I thought and I started to write. I wrote about a hundred pages and then work started to pour in. I put my manuscript away.
A few years later, when my daughter Kristin was about eight, I had run out of Narnia Chronicles to read to her and for a lark, I started to read her the beginning of my book. We read until the story came to its abrupt ending. She asked me:
“What happens next?”
“I don’t know, darling. I never finished it.”
“But Daddy, you HAVE to finish it!”

She would not stop bugging me until I agreed to start writing again. Years later, when it was time to edit this book prior to publishing, I realized that the one person I wanted to work on my book was my daughter. She is literally my first audience and my final editor.
What kind of a book is “The Unlikely Alchemist”? Obviously, it’s a fantasy for a young audience, but like all good children’s books, it must also appeal to an adult reader. I wrote the book to entertain myself not just my children.
It is a story about a boy and his sister and their quest in the land of Polymorph. They are in Polymorph as the result of a chemistry experiment gone horribly awry, or are they? Bart discovers that in this new land, he has powers that he cannot predict or understand and he is treated as a special person, an Alchemist.
I people my story with all sorts of creatures that appeal to me: talking animals, Giants, Vardays (huge, violent and stupid), Pensaurs (sarcastic, brilliant lizard-men, and others.
It is a story that I revelled in reading to my three children when they were young. I hope you and your children will enjoy it too.