People often ask how I find the illustrators for my books. In the case of both The Beastly Feast and Ten Friends, the answer is I don’t. The publisher buys my manuscript and then chooses an artist they think will be a good match for the text. This means that there are plenty of surprises for me when I see the art. When I wrote Ten Friends, I imagined the characters as people. So I was surprised—and delighted—to see that the artist, Heather Cahoon, imagined them quite differently. She created a wonderful cast of animal character to play the parts I wrote, from mouse tailors and octopus drummers to tiger ventriloquists and porcupine quilters.