“When I wrote out chapter one, I thought, where do I go from here? I thought maybe it would be a 48-page picture book.”Įven though she was in uncharted waters, Kessler noted, her ensuing course to publication was very smooth. “The editor thought I should write it as a book,” Kessler said. I lived on a boat at the time and I got this idea for a poem about a girl who lived on a boat with her mom, and the girl had a secret – she would sneak off at night to go play with the mermaids.” A friend of Kessler’s admired the poem and showed it to her editor. “I’d left a job and was working toward a novel-writing master’s degree. “It started off as a poem,” she recalled. It was in the late 1990s that Kessler saw the early glint of what would become Emily’s story, while looking out at the water she so loves. In the past decade, the series – five books so far – has reeled in more than 2.6 million copies in total sales of all print and e-book editions. shores 10 years ago, and was also Kessler’s debut novel. Emily’s maiden voyage, The Tail of Emily Windsnap (Candlewick, 2004), first landed on U.S. “I love the sea, I love boats, I love the water.” These are exactly the passionate words that fans of the Emily Windsnap books – featuring a 12-year-old girl who discovers she’s half mermaid – might expect from Emily’s creator, British author Liz Kessler.
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