Mira's Diary (19 page)

I could not have written this book without the help of three superb readers, Asa Stahl, Elias Stahl, and Joan Lester. They waded through a messy first draft to help me give this story the direction it needed. For fine-tuning various revisions I'm grateful to Elisa Kleven, Lisa Kaborycha, and Rob Scheifer. Sometimes it takes a village to make a book.

Marissa Moss grew up telling stories and drawing pictures to go with them. She sent her first picture book to publishers when she was nine, but mysteriously enough, never heard back from them. She didn't try again until she was a grown-up, and then it took five years of sending out stories, getting them rejected, revising them, and sending them out again until she got her first book.

Now she's written and illustrated over fifty books. Many of them are from her best-known series,
Amelia's Notebook
. When she wrote the first book fifteen years ago, the format of a handwritten notebook with art on every page was so novel, editors didn't know what to make of it. Now the diary format is a common format.

Mira's Diary: Lost in Paris
is another new kind of hybrid book—a mix of history, art, and time travel in the
Amelia
boundary-breaking vein.