Betsy Byars was born at Charlotte North Carolina.

I live in South Carolina on an airstrip. Both my husband and I are pilots. The bottom floor of our house is a hangar so we can just taxi out and take off, almost from our front yard.

 I loved a book called The Adventures of Mabel. Mabel was everything I wanted to be - pretty, adventuresome, a good horseback rider and she could communicate with animals

I have one sister - Nancy. She became a mathematician and I wanted to become one too, but I didn't have the smarts for Calculus, so I became a writer.

 My four children are adults now. Nan is an engineer, Guy is a computer expert, and two of my daughters, Betsy Duffey and Laurie Myers, write children's books of their own.

 Since my books are mostly realistic fiction, I get my ideas from the things that happen to me, to my kids, to my dogs and cats, to my friend's dogs and cats, and from things I see on TV and read about in the newspaper. I sometimes think my books are like scrapbooks of my life because almost every incident brings back a memory.

 Reading! Reading! Reading! It wasn't like a subject. It was a pleasure. I still read all the time - usually a book a day.

 I have a Scotty dog named Ace, a cat named Bibbs and some unnamed fish. I especially love dogs. I've been fortunate enough to have had almost twenty wonderful dogs share my life. One of the things I love about my fictional dogs is that they never die and will be with me always.

 It takes me about a year to write a novel - six months to get the rough draft down on paper and another six months to make it better. After that, it takes my publisher about a year to get the book in print, so from the time I get an idea to the time it's a book, it's about two years.