Inspiration for the Alice series?

Hello, I really want to know what inspired you to write the Alice series and what made you come up with it? How long did it take you to figure out how you would write it? and my final question is did you plan for it to be a whole series or just one book?

That was a long time ago, but I believe that the inspiration was reading about St. Agnes (I’m not Catholic, so intrigued me), who I believe was  a martyr because she refused to marry a nobleman, so had her breasts cut off–something like that.  And I got to thinking how a young girl today might view this.  Perhaps a motherless girl, who had to take all her questions to the supper table and ask her dad or older brother.  So I wrote “The Agony of Alice,” and thought that would be the extent of it.  But so many girls wrote to me, begging for more, and a reviewer wrote, “Alice’s many fans are waiting  for her further adventures.”  I talked to my editor and told her I would be willing to start a series as long as I didn’t have to write more than one book a year–could really take my time writing them, not turn them out like pancakes.  And she agreed.  And somewhere along the way I decided that 28 would be about the right number of books.