Don't miss Chris Van Allsburg's website

Chris Van Allsburg has his own website. They have taken a page from JKRowling.com. The site looks wonderful. There is a scavenger hunt, wallpaper, screensavers, a timeline of his career, printable bookmarks, coloring pages (from Bad Day at Riverbend) biographical information, writing submissions... lots of stuff to look at. This would be a wonderful extension to an author study.

Yet another good news story about the author by Samantha Critchell, Associated Press Writer

`The Polar Express,' I believe, was a story that came to me fairly quickly. It was more like a recovery of a memory than cooking up a story," he explains.

"It started out in my imagination as a story about a train — the idea of a train standing still in the forest of the winter. I imagined myself as a child approaching the train and that I could ask the train to take me anywhere ... and then I thought to myself, 'It's winter and I'd be able to go anywhere, and at 8 or 9 years old, where would I want to go?' Then I asked, `Where would I want to go on Christmas Eve?' Then it occurred to me, where else would I want to be on Christmas Eve other than the North Pole?"

USA Today story, Monday Nov. 8