Jane Yolen

It all began with my wonderful editor, Bonnie Verburg. She had worked with me at Harcourt and then again when she moved to Scholastic. Editors do bounce around and we writers bounce with them. One big happy Bouncy Castle.

Well, Bonnie got married to a Hollywood editor (who later won an Oscar for "The Matrix," but that's a different story) and they had a baby boy. She was a late bloomer but produced a remarkably adorable child when she finally got around to it.

When Robbie was a year old, Bonnie called me in Scotland, where I spend my summers. This was about five in the afternoon, as the time spread between Califunny and Caledonia is awful wide. She said, "My little boy hates going to bed at night and loves dinosaurs. Can you write something for him?"

I had had two of those myself. (My daughter, the first born, hadn't been into dinosaurs quite so much.) In fact I -- who cannot sew worth a hill of beans -- embroidered dinosaur pillows for them. That shows you what mother love can do. So I understood Bonnie's dilemma. Great kid. Big lizards. No sleeping.

"I'll see what I can do," I told Bonnie and by the next day this rollicking little verse rolled out, got revised three times, then faxed off to Bonnie who by return fax bought it.

"It's perfect," she said, then proceeded over two years to have me revise it a bunch more times.

Picture books, like poems, need word by word polishing. Novels take a big pick ax with which you carve them out of the local hillside. But picture books -- that's lapidary work. One gem at a time.

Now the original verse said, "How does a dinosaur say goodnight. . ." And I was thinking of one dinosaur and his family. But Mark Teague, the illustrator chosen for the book, thought that doing one dinosaur over and over would be visually boring. And there is nothing worse for a book than a bored illustrator. Besides, he had been a little boy once (and not that long ago) and he thought that that little boys who hate to go to bed love the variety in dinosaurs. So he suggested doing different big lizards and different families.

Of course that meant yet another revision, but as I loved his art and his ideas, that was not a problem. In fact it was an opportunity. As I like to tell my writing students, the word revision means re -- again vision -- dream. I got to dream again.

When I saw the Mark Teague illustrations, with their sassy dinosaurs and at-the-end-of-their-rope parents, I knew he'd taken my little rhyme a giant step further on. Scholastic apparently thought so, too. They gave it the cover of the catalog and first place there, made a poster and door hanger. I see it everywhere. In fact, four months on Publisher's Weekly's. I have never had a book do that before.

How do dinosaurs say goodnight? Evidently slowly. Even Cindy Crawford's little boy was reading it during her TVinterview on the Today show. And Robbie, for whom the book was originally written, was five years old when the book came out. The publishing process -- like the bedtime process -- can go on for a very long time.