This page is close captioned. If you cannot hear the sound when you click on "Click here," just hold the cursor over the button without clicking and Dr. Lorrah's words will appear.

Where do you get those crazy ideas?

I beat them off with a stick. Seriously, every writer has at least ten times as many ideas as he or she can write about.

Then how do you decide which stories to write?

When I know a whole story--beginning, middle, and end--then, if I have the time, that is the story I write.

But where do you begin?

Most often, I begin with characters. They come alive for me--more as if I met them than as if I invented them.

Is that how your new book, Nessie and the Living Stone, got started?

Yes--it started with the character of Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, and her underwater grotto.

You wrote that book with Lois Wickstrom. You have also written books with Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Winston Howlett. You do a lot of collaborating.

Yes, I do. It's fun, but not really efficient. The fact is, it takes two people as long to write one book as it would take for each of them to write a separate book.

Then why collaborate?

Because you end up with a better book. Because the ideas don't belong to either one of you, but to both of you. So you write it together.

How did you and Lois decide to write Nessie and the Living Stone?

In 1995, I went with Lois and her husband Eric to Scotland. We loved it--take a look at www.nessiebook.com for all the many things we discovered. We like to get off the beaten track when we travel.

Did you actually see Nessie?

No--but we did go all the way around Loch Ness. One of the places we stopped was at Boleskine House, which was once owned by the black magician Alistair Crowley. We couldn't get in then, but it's a bed and breakfast today.

So what made you decide to write about Nessie?

There was a wonderful view of the loch. We wandered around, looking across at Urquardt Castle and wishing that Nessie would surface. But we also stopped at tourist bureaus, getting maps and other information--and discovered that something was missing.

What was missing in the Scottish Tourist Bureaus?

Tourist bureaus, bookstores--everywhere in Scotland we found joke books about Nessie, recipe books, science books, history books--but not a single children's story about the Loch Ness monster! So we decided to fill the void. That's how we came to write 'Nessie and the Living Stone'!

small NessieVisit Nessie's Grotto.

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