what made you decide to write Shiloh Christmas?

Why did you wait 10 years to make another Shiloh book after Saving Shiloh. What make you decide to make Shiloh Christmas?

You ask a very interesting question, because after my first Shiloh book won the Newbery award, I told myself I wasn’t going to write a lot of sequels:  Shiloh Goes to the Beach; Shiloh goes to the Moon….  So I concentrated on writing more of the Boys Versus Girls books and other things.  But I received so many letters from students begging me to have something awful happen to Judd Travers, they hated him so much.  “Have Marty’s dad buy a gun and shoot him through the eye!” one boy wrote.  “Make his car go off a cliff and burn up,” a girl suggested.  I just didn’t want to leave readers with all that hate, so I wrote Shiloh Season, giving more details about the kind of life Judd experienced when he was growing up, and Marty’s growing empathy for him.  Yet even though he and Judd were not enemies any longer, I realized that Marty might still worry that Judd, still drinking a lot, might come upon Shiloh in the woods and shoot him while drunk.  I wondered what Judd would have to do to prove to Marty that he would never hurt Shiloh. That’s when I wrote Saving Shiloh.  But there was one more thing that seemed unsettled to me–Judd’s acceptance in the community.   I wanted to show that sometimes a whole community can divide into sides–that each side views the other as the one in the wrong.  And that sometimes it takes listening–really listening to the other side–to understand why they do what they do or believe what they believe.  And when you all work together on a project, very often your differences seem very small.  That’s what A Shiloh Christmas is about.