On Writing The Missing Barbegazi

The initial idea for the book came to me while skiing, a couple of years before I began writing the story. At the time, I was rewriting (for the nth time) an MG fantasy novel set in the afterlife, so I wrote my thoughts on the skiing story in my notebook and later copied them into my ideas collection—a Scrivener file with notes about potential future projects—and then I forgot all about it.

After a “First Pages session” at AFCC (Asian Festival of Children’s Content) in 2015, my dream editor,...