My son (9) is writing a horror story with his friend in a shared notebook at school. I am delighted. He was telling me (in intricate detail) the plot and I mentioned he should read the book Coraline as it had similar vibes. He said he’d seen the movie and found it very scary.

I said he should try the book anyway. Books could be both scarier and not as scary at the same time.

So he asked me about the author and I said, “oh you like him and his writing already!” And he was so confused so I mentioned you were same author that wrote Fortunately The Milk, the Chu’s Day books, and the Blueberry Girl book his sister loved. He was dumbfounded.

Then he asked me why you’d written both Coraline and Fortunately The Milk.

I looked up the answer to the former on Tumblr (thanks for tagging!) and read it and he liked the answer a lot. But we weren’t sure about the latter. I told him it might be similar to one of the reasons you wrote Coraline.l, but that I would send you a message to see if you might answer.

So here’s the question - why did you write Fortunately The Milk?

(He also likes The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish so if you want to answer the same question for that one too, that’d be awesome.)

I wrote Fortunately The Milk because I liked the idea of writing a book with a good dad who did stuff. Dads tend to get short shrift in fiction, especially children's fiction. I liked the idea of making up for The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish...

Who invented the cheese grater?

Same guy who invented pizza. He wanted to turn the mozzarella into smaller bits to let it melt and all was well for ages, until four turtles devoured all his pizza and he became their sworn villain, Shredder.