One day I was standing in my living room looking at the row of yellow spines on my collection of Tom Swift Jr. books.

In the summer of 1969, I discovered Tom Swift Jr. among the possessions of my Uncle George, who had died the year before in Viet Nam.  I started reading them and was hooked.  I was hooked on Tom Swift, on science fiction, and on reading.

So that day, looking at Tom Swift, I thought, “that’s the type of book I should write next.”  I wanted to capture the same feeling of excitement and innocence that I found when I read Tom Swift Jr., but I wanted to update the stories and make them my own.  I sat down and created the setting and the characters, and made a list of inventions that stories could be built around.

Two things that I always had trouble with as a reader of Tom Swift.  First, time never passed.  Tom was always 18.  The second, his inventions never seemed to change the world, no matter how innovative and revolutionary they were.  I decided that Astrid’s would.  I still plan to write one Astrid book a year for the next few years.  After that, well, we’ll see.