Click here to hear part of a song from the 100th Annual Alabama State Sacred Harp Convention, where I began writing Santa’s Secrets Revealed. After clicking on this link, scroll down and click on the MP3 clip. My voice is just one of hundreds at that yearly Birmingham event!

If you wish to attend a coming Sacred Harp Convention anywhere in the U.S., go to http://fasola.org.

Click here to see a picture of me in front of a Viking cart at Vikingskiphuset, the Viking Ship museum in Oslo, Norway.

            After a quick trip to see the 1200-year-old Viking ships (I couldn't miss that!), I took a train to Bergen, and from there I rode by ship to the northern tip of Norway.  There I found a spunky lady who was about to leave for Spitsbergen to study plants that can survive extreme cold.  She just happened to have her own rickety plane at the ready.
            Luckily, I spoke Norwegian, since she spoke no English.  She told the most amazing stories.  One story told how she was the first lady to fly a plane over the North Pole—blindfolded.
            I sat down and strapped myself in, and she told me to take off.
            I looked at her in confusion.
            “Didn’t you say you’re a pilot?” she asked in Norwegian.
            Then I realized my Norwegian wasn’t quite as good as I’d thought.  What I’d meant to say was, “More cream, please,” but somehow I’d accidentally told her I was a famous Romanian stunt pilot.
            After I explained that I couldn’t even fly a kite, she took over the controls and we lifted off.  Soon we were buzzing over empty miles of ocean.  I thought we were headed for her research station on one of the islands of Spitsbergen.  But I’d misunderstood her Norwegian again.  She was actually bringing me straight to the Pole!

Click here to see me waiting by the harbor in Bergen for the ship to sail up to northern Norway.
 

            Hours later, we landed.
            Edny seemed to know her way, so I followed her between the colorful candy houses along streets full of elves.  It was like Christmas in July, literally.  In Santa Land it really is Christmas all year long.
            At the edge of town we found a delicate cookie cottage held together with frosting.  Icicles taller than broom handles hung from the eaves.  We knocked on the door, and a swirl of fresh chocolate-chip cookie steam swirled out as the door opened.
            There he stood—Santa Claus.
            I told him why I had come, and he invited me in.  I sat down at a giant oak table carved from a single stump, and slid the pages I’d written into his hands.
            I was so nervous I almost couldn’t breathe.  What if he didn’t like what I’d said about him in my rough draft? He started to read, and quickly came to the place where I had described him as looking like a giant Bing cherry.  Santa stopped and his left eyebrow went up.
            “I don’t know about this,” he said.
            Oh, no, I thought.  I was in trouble now.  Now he was going to whip out an extra-bold red marker and add me to the naughty list.
            I spoke in hardly more than a whisper, “You. . . you don’t like my writing?”
            “Your writing’s fine—but I don’t look like a giant Bing cherry.  I’m Maraschino all the way!”  He swept his hands over his bright red suit.
            That was when I relaxed.  I saw that Santa wasn’t going to get upset about what I’d written, even if I questioned his fashion sense.
            During the next hour, he went line-by-line through my rough draft, giving me many great suggestions to improve the writing.  He answered every question I had.
            When we were done, he slid some papers into my hand.  I looked down and saw a page of pizza coupons and a pair of Springsteen tickets.
            “Front row!” I said, my mouth falling open.
            “You ever hear that song he did about me?  Pretty good, huh?  That’s actually me playing the glockenspiel.”

Click here to see me interviewing the Director of Elf Fashions on the many moods of green and red.

Click here to see me interviewing the same elf an hour later. Here he's explaining the controversial question of whether or not chartreuse is a true green. He was truly an elf with a passion for his work.

            When I got back home from the Pole, my bags bursting with pages of notes, I felt ready to write.  I wrote and rewrote until I had a version that seemed finished, then sent it to a few editors who might be interested.
            They weren’t.
 
 

            Even though the first few editors rejected the book (one came close to publishing it), I didn’t give up.  I kept sending it to people who might share my vision for bringing Santa's secrets to the world.
            Then, after a weekend at a singing event in Minneapolis, I found a message on my answering machine.  An editor at from HarperCollins who had just moved to Carolrhoda Books was interested in the book, now titled Santa’s Secrets Revealed.
            Of course, she had ideas for revision.  A great editor can give you the ideas to make a good book into a fantastic book.  I didn’t know it yet, but this editor would turn out to be one of the best.

Click here to see a page from an unpublished early version I wrote between 1999 and 2001. Note that it is VERY different from the final published book! (The biggest difference is that I had an elf doing the narration.)
 
 

            I rewrote the whole book and sent her my new version.  She liked it, but I hadn’t really revised it enough.  Now she dug in and gave me a detailed analysis of the book, with dozens of great ideas on how to make it both a fact-packed nonfiction book and a thrilling story of a child’s adventures with Santa.
            Once again, I changed nearly everything in the book.
            This time, she liked it enough to send me the contract.
            Santa’s Secrets Revealed would be illustrated by Barry Gott, the perfect artist for the job.  His style captured the fun of Santa’s world, and he even had met Santa himself!  It turned out that Barry lived in Cleveland, almost within view of Santa’s North American headquarters.  I am still amazed at the connections my editor must have—to find an illustrator who knew Santa personally!  (I wonder what she’d come up with if I wrote a nonfiction book about UFOs.  “Illustrated by Zborx Zbeeg?”)
            It was my editor’s idea to give the book more of a narrative.  As I wrote, I found that the scientific details behind Santa’s kingdom really did fit into my new storyline.  Making the book tell more of a story allowed me to put in some of the book’s best material—for example, that time when Santa’s computers almost blew up during a naughtiness surge.
            Even the most wonderful book can be made better.  That’s why authors need editors, and why editors request changes in even the best of books.  A drastic revision almost always improves a book, almost regardless of which direction that revision takes.
 
 

            But guess what—even though I had written this “finished” version, and even though I had a contract in my hand, there were still years of rewriting ahead.  Barry Gott went to work on the pictures, and as the art developed, my editors decided to expand the book with extra pages.
            Along the way, my editor had kept asking me to put more and more material into the book.  Soon its pages contained much more text than most children’s picture books.  When I sent in my new final version, I included a dummy layout to prove that it really would fit into the usual thirty-two pages of a picture book.  She liked my layout, but she eventually decided there were too many words per page.
            She added pages to spread the story out more, and had me do some cutting.  Now none of the pages looked cluttered.
            When Barry had finished making the pictures, my editor had me go through the book again to scrape away every single unnecessary word.  I was glad for this chance to tighten the book further—because even though I had already pared it down quite a bit, there really were scenes and sentences that could be sacrificed for the good of the book.
            Now the art was finished and publication was ten months away.  And yet my editors and I were still sending emails back and forth about important changes.
 
 

            On Dec 31, 2003, I spent two hours in the afternoon trying to revise the paragraph leading up to the last page.  My stepsister had noticed an inconsistency in the ending that I couldn’t seem to fix.  I tinkered with the new adjustments over and over, reading the story aloud five or six times to my seven-year-old Jenny and three-year-old Justin in our living room.  Justin eventually lost interest and started building a city out of plastic blocks.  Jenny stuck with me for most of the two hours—she’s a big-time reader—but on the last go through, even she complained about reading the story one more time.
            I came back to the story at 11:15 that night to look at alternate versions and to tinker some more.  I made my final decision for the book, changing “hearts” to “wishes,” and began to read the revised final version.  At exactly midnight between the years 2003 and 2004, the new version seemed right.  The fireworks went off throughout the city and I looked at the clock.  12:00.  New Year's Eve changed to New Year's Day
            It’s not often that I literally hear fireworks as the final touches on a story come together after years of work.

            When I woke up the next morning, the joke was on me!  I showed my “final” version to my wife, and we both saw that it was too flowery.  So the fireworks were just another intrusion of dramatic irony into a writer’s life.  The French poet Paul Valéry said that a poem is never finished, only abandoned.  I wasn’t even to the place where I could safely abandon it yet.
            A month later I still was making changes.  I made what I thought was my last change on February 8, 2004, changing “cow” to “Holstein.”  A week later, I considered changing the Dancing Holstein to a Harmonious Hoofer, but in the end the assistant editor and I decided to go with the Holstein.  In May, just days before the deadline, my editors and others at the publishing house were still asking for changes.
           Santa’s Secrets Revealed would appear in stores nearly five years after the day I sat and scribbled out its first rough ideas in a Birmingham hotel.

Click here to see some of the versions of the book's ending that I wrote on the last evening of 2003.
 

            The months oozed slowly by, the seasons changed, and finally the day came.  The doorbell rang and I found a heavy tan package outside my door.
            I peeled back the paper, and there they were—twenty-five copies of the finished book.  I quickly riffled through the top copy, afraid I would find it printed upside-down or with missing pages.  It all looked better than I could have imagined.
            Then a paper fell out.  I picked it up and saw that it was a note.
            “Fantastic gift book, James.  I’m sure I’ll see this title in thousands and thousands of Christmas wish lists.”
            I grabbed the wrapping paper off the floor.  There were no UPS or FedEx labels anywhere on the package, just a few nearly melted ice crystals.
            In three leaps I was out the door.
            I hurriedly looked up and down the block, and saw nobody.  But from somewhere above me, I caught the faint sound of bells.