About the Author
Kate and I never expected to have books written about us. We were just two regular kids. Sure, I can hit a baseball pretty well. And Kate’s one of the smartest people I know. But we weren’t the type of kids that anything unusual happened to.
Until we started visiting ballparks. That’s when strange things began happening. First the star player’s bat was stolen. Then, we found a ghost. Now, it seems like anytime Kate and I go to ballparks, something mysterious happens. In fact, we had such fun adventures that Kate thought we should write a book about them.
But that seemed like too much work to me. I’d rather be practicing my pitching. So I came up with an even better idea. Kate’s mom has a friend who is a writer. His name is David A. Kelly. He lives near Boston. But he grew up with Kate’s mother not far from Cooperstown, New York. They went to high school together. He used to play baseball when he was little, but he wasn’t very good. That’s why he became a writer. He has two sons (who are good baseball players), a nice wife who’s also a writer, and dog named Samantha. She’s a little crazy, but she loves to play with stuffed animals.
Mr. Kelly’s written about a lot of different subjects, like places to travel to and cool new gadgets. But he’s also interested in baseball. In fact, he even wrote a book about the greatest hitter of all time, Babe Ruth! His book, Babe Ruth and the Baseball Curse (Random House) tells all about Babe Ruth, the Boston Red Sox, and how some people think the Red Sox were cursed after they sold Babe to their arch rivals, the New York Yankees! It’s a pretty neat book even if you aren’t a Red Sox fan!
With all that baseball and writing experience, Mr. Kelly seemed like the perfect person to help us out. We asked him if he’d be willing to write about our ballpark trips.
He said yes!
Now, when we get home from a trip to a ballpark, we tell Mr. Kelly all about it, and he writes it up into a book. It usually takes him a couple months to do it. I guess he’s a slow writer, like me. One time he showed me an early draft of the first book. It had all kinds of pencil marks on it from his editor at Random House, Jennifer Arena. She makes more suggestions than my language arts teacher does on my homework! It’s her job to make sure the book is well written and makes sense, so she helps Mr. Kelly organize all our adventures.
Creating a book also requires an illustrator. Mr. Kelly tried drawing the pictures. But that didn’t work out so well. Take a look at his picture of me:
So, Ms. Arena helped find someone who knows what they’re doing. She found Mark Meyers to draw the pictures. He’s a terrific illustrator and can draw just about anything. Which is important, since we get into so many unbelievable situations.
That’s why Mr. Kelly and Mr. Meyers get their names on the books.
But I still think we ended up with the better end of that deal.
We get our pictures on the cover!
Oh, and for more on David A. Kelly, visit him here.
