And when I became a teacher my favorite part of being a teacher was reading out loud to the students. And we would always have like, there would be you know particular times during the week and we would have the book that we were working on and it would be separate from the books that they were reading and interacting with in a more scholarly way, you know the books that I would share out loud were just for the joy of it.
And so we read, gosh, we read all kinds. We read Holes by Louis Sachar. We read A Wrinkle in Time out loud. That was really fun to read out loud. We read Harry Potter. I loved just the experience of sharing books out loud. And so for me now in my sort of like this next iteration as a writer of books and writer of books for children, how the language sounds and how you interact with the text and the aural way is something that I actually think about a lot.
I think a lot about how this would be for a teacher reading it to a bunch of kids or for a parent reading it out loud to their own children. And so all of my books, I do all of my editing out loud. And I perform it at home to my dog whose name is Serious Black, who is nothing like his namesake. Alas he would not last five minutes in Azkaban. He’s very needy.
But anyway, I want to feel how the story feels in my body. When it feels right to read it out loud then I know it’s right.