I’m going to show you my second moon book, The Full Moon at the Napping House and yeah, when I was a child I — whenever the moon would get large I had difficulty sleeping at night. It would be so bright and everything so the first moon that we did, moon book that we did was Moonflute and this particular book, Full Moon at the Napping House is the second book. What is this, companion book, we like to call her a best friend.
Best friend to The Napping House and what is interesting about The Napping House is that after it was published many children and teachers began to write us and ask us continually can you please write another Napping House and they even sent us wonderful suggestions. They sent me wonderful suggestions, drawings, suggestions for stories and they were inspiring, but they weren’t just right for me.
They didn’t work out because the first book, The Napping House had such a — to me it was perfect. It didn’t need another book to go with it.
So anyway, 30 years later the second book came out and the way that that happened is that we moved into our second house that we have lived together in in all of our many years. The first house, that’s where The Napping House came out of and that was in a coastal city in California and it was there that — I couldn’t see the moon because of the fog at night, but when we moved to our second home which was in Hawaii, everything changed.
The skies were clear. You could see at nighttime. I would watch the moon move and we had fairly dark — we had a dark property.
No lights.
No lights and they would move from — the moon would change all of its phases -
No electricity.
And by the time it was full I couldn’t sleep. I was back to that point and so I began to wonder well what would it be like if there was a full moon because I was restless. I would go outside and take all these walks with my dog at night and there were lots of different animals out there like our goats and our chickens and our geese and -
They all thought it was day.
They did. They were running around.
The chickens would be out of the coop. The goats would be butting heads. The moon is so bright.
Yes, and so I did wonder. I thought wow, what would it be like to write a story about the full moon shining down on The Napping House? And so that’s where the idea came from. Wasn’t the whole story blown up in a second, but it piqued my curiosity. Yes, it piqued my curiosity.