I have one rule, and I’ve been doing this a long time, so I pretty much know what’s too scary – and what’s not scary enough. My editors usually are asking me to make things scarier. I’m pretty conservative, because you don’t really want to terrify kids. You want to creep them out a little bit, but you don’t really want to terrify them. I try to make sure that the kids know that these books are fantasies. I keep the real world out. So, I don’t do real serious subjects. I don’t even have divorced parents. I wouldn’t do child abuse, or drugs. I wouldn’t do anything in the real world. They have to know that these are just fantasies and that they’re not really happening. Once you’ve established that, you can get pretty scary.
