part0070

When I sat down to begin writing the first book in this series, many years ago, I imagined a book about were-aardvarks. I’m not sure why, completely, other than the term “were-aardvark” seemed funny to me, funnier than a “were-anteater” anyway, just like pickles are funnier than cucumbers and borscht is funnier than gazpacho, although gazpacho is still reasonably funny.

But I hadn’t gone far in my writing when I decided a were-aardvark wasn’t the best fit, because Bolt longed for a family and aardvark families aren’t particularly memorable, at least not from the very small amount of research I did, which consisted of reading an article on Wikipedia for about three minutes. But that seemed like enough research. I invite you to write a were-aardvark book, though. If you do, please include me in your acknowledgments. And I will include you in mine:

With my next were-animal, a penguin, I hit the jackpot. Their lifelong mating habits, their lack of fierceness, and my love of fish sticks all came together. It was meant to be.

So I wrote The Curse of the Werepenguin , and proceeded to write approximately one hundred redrafts of it. This book, the sequel to The Curse of the Werepenguin , was a much easier path, with a significant reduction in redrafts. I knew the story, you see. Even when writing The Curse of the Werepenguin, I was aware of where the story might go, although at the time I didn’t know if there would be a Revenge of the Werepenguin for certain. Still, the facts and details were already imagined, mostly. The pirate came later—a comment by my wonderful editor brought him to life—but mostly everything else was already there, if not on paper then in my head, hiding.

Things often hide in my head, you see, including proper acknowledgments, which is why I have to keep hitting my left ear as I write this, hoping to jar them out of my right ear (I’m a righty, otherwise I’d have to hit the other ear). So Kendra Levin, the editor I alluded to in the previous paragraph, gets a big acknowledged thank-you, as does Hannah Mann, who I suspect played a bigger role than she would admit, even if that role was an avalanche of positive thinking, which is something I always need more of.

Thank you also to Dana Leydig, who came late to the party but ended up sticking around and helping clean up. People who help clean up after parties are always welcome, and thankfully she’s already RSVPed to my next shindig. Thank you to Scott Brown, whose illustrations are beyond words, which I guess is the point of illustrations. I also must thank the copyeditors, as copyediting always makes me look much better than I would otherwise, so thank you to Janet Pascal and Laura Stiers. Also thank you to Krista Ahlberg, Abigail Powers, and Marinda Valenti.

I would also like to thank everyone at Viking, including, and this is in no particular order, Sarah Moses, Kim Ryan, Ken Wright, Kate Renner, Tessa Meischeid, and Friya Bankwalla. They all played different roles, from art direction to helping spread werepenguinism around the world, but each was important and appreciated more than they will ever know.

Lastly, I want to thank my family: Lauren, Madelyn and Emmy, my parents, my sister Deena and her family (a shout-out to Mike, Alyssa, and Kyle! Hi!), and, well, anyone else that puts up with me. It’s not always that easy to put up with me but hey, at least you get to see your name in an end-of-book acknowledgment, and that’s pretty awesome.