Margaret McAllister has always wanted to write and used to make up stories in her head even before she was old enough to get them down on paper. Hold My Hand and Run is her second novel. She had been thinking about setting a book in the 1600s, but couldn't envision the characters or the plot. "One night," she writes, "I went to bed worrying about something. As soon as I woke up I knew exactly what to do about it. I decided to make that the starting point of this book-somebody waking up with the answer to a problem. Then I had to ask who this person was, and what she worried about, and at that point Kazy marched in and took over." Ms. McAllister lives in England with her husband and their three teenaged children. copyright ? 2000 by Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.