Bella Brown Visits a Bee Farm follows a young girl who is in the garden with her grandmother when she is frightened by a bee, so her grandmother takes her to visit a bee farm to learn about these amazing insects. What was the inspiration for your story?

I surprised my wife, Alicia, with a visit to a local beekeeper store because she was interested in becoming a beekeeper.

While reading through the children’s books they had about bees, I realized I could write a story that would connect with young readers more effectively and help them understand these amazing creatures in a deeper way.

What were some educational aspects about bees that were important for you to include in this children’s book?

The book shows eight-year-old Bella Brown’s journey from fear of bees to fascination as she learns more about them. This transformation applies to all of us – the more we understand our fears, the easier they become to manage.

After reading books about bees and researching everything I could find online, I contacted a bee farmer in Pennsylvania called Aunt Fancy, who was incredibly generous with her knowledge.

She not only answered the fifteen most common questions kids have about bees, but shared additional fascinating details – like how bees communicate with one another through a special wiggle dance.

Everything Aunt Fancy shared with me went directly into the book, which is one of the reasons I dedicated it to her. While any of us can search online for information, speaking directly with experts provides an invaluable depth to education that you simply can’t get from research alone.

What scene in the book did you have the most fun writing?

It’s a two-way tie between two scenes:

First, the scene where Grandma Yetta asks Bella to help in the backyard garden. Readers see Bella standing in the doorway, dressed in oversized garden clothes – hat, gloves, boots – hugging a larger-than-normal garden bag stuffed with every kind of gardening tool. She beams and says, ‘I’m ready!’ You can see all of Bella’s enthusiasm and eagerness to help Grandma Yetta.

Then, when you turn the page, readers see a humongous, non-threatening bee with a friendly smile splashed across its face on the far left page, following Bella, who’s on the far right page, screaming ‘AHHHHHHHhhhhhhh!’ with all her garden tools flying out of her bag.

While there are no bees that size in real life, in an eight-year-old’s mind who’s afraid of bees, this is exactly how they might perceive them. But for readers viewing the scene, this oversized, smiling, friendly-looking bee is the complete opposite of threatening, which sets up the book’s central message perfectly

Can you tell us more about what’s in store for Bella Brown and the direction of the next book?

I’ve written twelve picture books for children ages four to eight. Two are standalone books that take place in the same universe, as well as ten Bella Brown books – the first eight make up the core Bella Brown series, while books nine and ten launch the Bella Brown Holiday Series.

And in all my picture books, readers with keen eyes can spot Pip the Domovoi hidden in the background of various illustrations – it’s like my signature, so they know they’re reading one of my books.

The series gets especially exciting in Book Four, Bella Brown Meets Pip the Domovoi, where Bella’s late-night encounter with a tiny, blue-haired house spirit changes everything. When Pip desperately needs her help before sunrise to prevent Sinti from threatening both worlds, Bella discovers that the butterfly locket Grandma Yetta gave her isn’t just a family heirloom – it’s a magical key that makes her the guardian between two worlds.

In Book Five, Bella Brown—Dragonfly-Dragonfly-Dragonfly, Pip comes to Bella for help saving both worlds when Sinti threatens to shatter an ancient crystal at Earth’s core. Riding on the backs of 300-million-year-old dragonflies at 60 miles per hour, Bella must use everything she’s learned about being a Key Keeper to prevent both realms from merging into darkness.

Book Six, Bella Brown—Pip’s Perfect Purple Present, brings delightful chaos when Pip borrows Papa Pip’s magic paintbrush without permission to surprise Bella by painting her bedroom purple. But the paintbrush escapes and paints everything – Bella’s cat, Grandma Yetta, houses, the school, teachers, classmates, even zoo animals – in every shade and tone of purple imaginable. Can Pip catch the runaway paintbrush and undo the colorful catastrophe before everyone’s permanently purple and before Bella gets home from school?

Book Seven, Bella Brown’s Ten-Moon Mysteries, takes readers on a camping adventure in Grandma Yetta’s backyard, where Bella and two school friends share stories about the different colored moons they’ve witnessed together – from dramatic blood moons to mysterious blue moons, golden harvest moons to rare purple moons. Each moon color becomes a gateway to both scientific understanding and cultural traditions from around the world.

In Book Eight, Bella Brown’s Baking Bedlam, Bella and Pip attempt to make Grandma Yetta’s cookies but don’t know how to measure correctly. Soon they’re swimming in a kitchen full of ingredients. This book teaches what happens when measurements go wrong and includes three delicious cookie recipes kids can actually make.

The Holiday Series begins with Book Nine, Bella Brown’s Candy Cane Curfuffle, where Bella’s class dresses as Christmas figures from around the world, leading to debates about which figure should represent their school on the parade float (Santa Claus, Christkind, the Three Kings, Ded Moroz, Krampus, and Christmas witches). Can Bella and her classmates come together and break through their Christmas figure curfuffle and participate in the town’s annual Candy Cane Festival Parade?

Finally, Bella Brown’s Turkey Trot Tizzy (Book Ten) features Bella – the slowest runner in school – participating in a charity run where she encounters classmates stuck in mud, tangled in circus balloon strings, and even escaped zoo monkeys.

Each stop to help puts her further behind, but Bella discovers that sometimes finishing last means finishing first because you’ve put others first.

And moving on to my standalone book, The Stomp-Clomp-Clump Monster Above the Bed, is told from the perspective of Fred, a monster living under Bella’s brother Billy’s bed. I wrote it because I always wanted to know how the monster felt about having noisy children above.

It completely flips the traditional story – now the monster and his dust bunny friends are terrified of the human child stomping overhead.

The other standalone book, Pip’s Epic Treasure Hunt, expands authentic Slavic domovoi folklore by creating an original nine-clan system where Pip teams up with domovoi from Earth, Air, Fire, and Dimensional clans to find five legendary magical objects before Sinti, a mischievous shadow creature who threatens both the human and magical worlds, can use them for cosmic pranks.

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