Why did it take you ten years to finally write a sequelokay, companion book–to Just Ella?
I was busy writing other books (Twenty other books, to be exact–I wasn’t just goofing off!) I had really enjoyed writing Just Ella, and I always had it in the back of my mind that I would want to write more about Ella at some point. But I hadn’t really figured out what I wanted to write about her. Then I got the idea for Cecilia and her dilemma a few years ago, and I began to see connections between the stories. When I was a kid I used to imagine characters from various books getting to meet each other (I always thought Anne of Green Gables, Jo from Little Women, and Laura from the Little House on the Prairie books would get along really well.) So this was a way to match up my own characters from different books.
