Dear Reader,

A lot of people know that Frindle was my first novel for children, but almost no one knows that Things Not Seen was my second novel. The first draft of Things Not Seen was finished in the summer of 1996, and to be fair to the editors who rejected that manuscript, my earliest attempt to tell the story of an invisible boy was all over the map. In the original story there were subplots galore. There were gangsters, car chases, airplane trips, encounters with vicious dogs, and large chunks of frantic action in at least three different parts of the country. Looking back over that draft, I think I was simply excited to have learned from Frindle that, yes, I actually could write a novel. Apparently, that feeling of discovered ability went right to my head.

After Things Not Seen had been roundly rejected, I got involved with writing more middle-grade novels—The Landry News, The Janitor’s Boy, The School Story, and others—but I never really gave up on the core idea of Things Not Seen. I still wanted to tell a story that treated invisibility as if it were factually happening to a fairly normal fifteen-year-old kid. And the interaction between the invisible boy, Bobby, and the blind girl, Alicia, was what I found most interesting.

So in the year 2000, I again sent that flawed first manuscript to the publishers of Frindle, and they again urged me to keep writing the middle-grade novels that had been so successful. I then sent the manuscript to Patti Gauch at Philomel Books, an editor I’d known for many years. Patti agreed with me that the quirky heart of the novel—the relationship between an invisible boy and a blind girl—was worth exploring. Then she warned me that there was hard work ahead. She did not lie.

Patti helped me cut away the excess plotlines, taught me to see a truer story arc, and I learned how to make events flow from the thoughts and feelings and needs of the characters, how to make a plot grow from the inside out.

The results of that intense rewriting process have been so satisfying. Things Not Seen was published in 2002. It was reviewed well, it sold well, and among all my other books, it is the novel that has drawn some of the most ardent letters from kids and teachers and parents. I am especially grateful that Things Not Seen won the very first ALA Schneider Family Book Award in 2004, an honor given to “a book that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences”—which is an example of the law of unintended consequences, as well as a tribute to the strength of Alicia’s character.

I want to thank each reader, and I hope to keep writing stories that are worth your time and thought.

Sincerely yours,