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Jason Segel

How Jason Segel's nightmares became a book for kids

Bob Minzesheimer
USA TODAY
Actor Jason Segel says his debut novel is inspired by his own real-life nightmares.

NEW YORK – "Where do you get your ideas from?" is among the most common questions authors get from readers of all ages, but especially kids.

The answers aren't always simple. Stephen King often jokes that his ideas come from Utica, N.Y.

Four kids authors traced their inspiration at breakfast Friday at BookExpo America, the annual bookselling convention:

– Actor Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Muppets) said his debut novel, Nightmares, co-written by Kirsten Miller, (out Sept. 9) is inspired by his own real-life nightmares.

As a kid, he dreamed of "witches eating my toes," which he declared "so scary, so weird." The book is the first in la trilogy staring a boy named Charlie, who like Segel, learns that the things we're most afraid of can make us stronger -- "if only we're brave enough to face them."

Becoming a kids author at 34, Segel said, has pushed "my adorability ratings up 1,000%. My mother thanks you."

– Mem Fox, the Australian literacy expert and author of picture books including Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, said her latest book, Baby Bedtime (Aug. 26), illustrated by Emma Quay, would never have been written if she had not become a grandmother.

Four years ago, Fox's first grandchild, Theo, was born 10 weeks premature, weighed in at 2 pounds and looked "like a wizened monkey. But to me, he was the most perfect baby."

She wrote him a poem that begins "I could eat your little ears/I could nibble your nose," which is just how her book begins.

– Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid; The Long Haul,ninth in his best-selling series, will be released Nov. 4, Kinney said his narrator, Greg Hefley, a self-centered middle-schooler, was inspired in part by J.K. Rowling's heroic Harry Potter. Not so much by Harry himself, but the idea of a kid "who's nothing like Harry, who more like me, full of flaws."

Kinney said he and his wife are opening an independent bookstore in their hometown of Plainville, Mass. Dead-pan, he added, "We're doing it to get rich," which drew much laughter in a ballroom full of independent booksellers.

– Carl Hiassen, the Florida novelist best known for grown-up comic adventures such as Strip Tease and Double Whammy, questioned if his characters "should be let loose on the youth of America?'

But he decided he could write with the "same smart-ass attitude" if he cleaned up the language and "left out the trapeze in the bedroom."

Hiaasen's next novel, Skink No Surrender, (out Sept. 23, aimed at readers 12 and up) features one of his best known grown-up characters, Skink, a ragged former Florida governor who lives in the woods. It's narrated by a boy who cleans up Skink's language and notes "he's cussing again,' without using the actual words, although, as Hiaasen said, "kids know them."

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