Since you've read down this far, allow me to share some behind-the-scenes dish on At Your Service only the coolest website visitors will know. 

 

 

This book saved my sister's life. She was reading an early version and noticed a place where I'd made a mistake, so she got out of bed to find a pen. When she opened her bedroom door, she was shocked to find the living room was filled with smoke. She was in a log cabin in a very rural (as in: far, far from a fire station!) part of West Virginia and something sitting on top of the wood-burning stove had caught fire. She was able to get the fire out before it spread, but only because she caught it when she did. My new life motto: continue making lots of mistakes!  

 

The king in At Your Service is named after my dad. When I was a kid, my dad would always tell my sister and me that he was the missing Crown Prince of Lithuania. He used this as bait to try to convince us to have better table manners. He'd say, "When I'm called back to my castle, they're not going to allow you to attend our balls unless you learn to keep your elbows off the table and your napkin in your lap." It mostly worked (even though I still hide books under my napkin.) Sad was the day we realized that castle was all a big, fat, giant LIE! But I forgave my dad and when it came time to pick a name for the king, I knew just whose name to pick. I even gave him a promotion from prince to king. You're welcome, Dad. 

 

One of the ways Chloe gets to know her guests is through entries in a smash book (want your very own? Go to the homepage and click on the hedgehog. See what happens.) Except, when I was writing, I couldn't remember what those books were called. I knew there was a Judy Blume book from my childhood that featured them and I figured if I could find that, I could find the name I needed. When I was little and we didn't have the internet, we had to call the telephone operator with burning questions like this, but now there's Twitter. So I went there and I asked if anyone knew the name of the book and do you KNOW who answered me three seconds later? JUDY BLUME! JUDY BLUME HERSELF TWEETED THE ANSWER TO ME!!! And then I died and now I am writing this from the afterworld. Someone please see that my fish gets fed.