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Juvenile Fiction |
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Murphy found himself living in an old converted factory, once used to mix pigments for Crayola over 100 years ago. This century-old mill still had the original scribbles along the walls from factory workers who hand-tested each batch of crayons for color. As the first and only writer to ever live in a Crayola building, Murphy became moved by the history and realized he had written for nearly every audience, except directly for children. It was this epiphany that made him break ground on a series of juvenile books in 2004, each illustrated by magazine/book artist Scott Dalrymple.
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For
years, millions of parents have looked to Murphy for the best toy, book and gift
suggestions to buy their kids for the holidays. But it wasn’t being hired every
holiday season to pull together Better Homes and Gardens’ Annual Holiday Toy
and Gift Guide (the unofficial largest toy guide in magazines every year)
that inspired him to try his hand at juvenile fiction. It was temporarily
settling into the small town of Easton, PA (the birthplace of Binney & Smith,
the inventors of the Crayola crayon) that motivated the writer.
Murphy's
first book [title withheld temporarily for copyright reasons] is the amusing tale of a
little boy named Ted who finds a cat with no name. Every day, someone always
seems to have a better idea about what the cat should be called... while every
night, Ted tries to fall asleep with a cat that never listens to a single
command he says. What he doesn’t realize is that his heart already named her for
him the very day they met.