Ann Stephens: My name is Ann Marie Stephens, and I'm the author of Catastrophe, illustrated by Jenn Harney. I wanted to write a book about cats who didn't quite know how to make patterns and I wanted them to fumble and bumble their way through the patterns like we do in the classroom when we're just learning how to do them. The most fun part about creating the book was having the fish be smarter than the cats, outsmarting the cats with their whole mission of catching the fish. And I liked building up to that and making the cats have mistakes in their patterns that led to the ending of the book.

The biggest challenge of this book was having the math tell the story and not turn the story into a technical math story. I wanted it to be something that had a plot, something that had a proper beginning, middle, and end and a climax and making sure that the math went with that was definitely the hardest part. My process was a lot of revisions. Basically, I brainstormed the setting first, because I knew I was going to have the cats doing these messed up patterns. So once I found my setting, I came up with the goal of what it was the cats were going to do, which was try to catch some dinner, which would be the fish. And in order to have them continue to mess up, I knew I had to have lots of little mistakes along the way. So the patterns became inaccurate, which led to the actual physical mistakes in the book. So once I had that whole idea down, the lineup of what was going to happen, I just had to make sure that the patterns were something that was natural and that one led to the next, each piece of action. Then it was just lots of revisions with my editors.

I think that it's okay to not know how to do something. The patterns are really what is the overall thing in the book, but I think the fact that the fish are smarter than the cats and that the cats keep messing up the patterns, but they continue to function and have fun and the ending is so great for them that I'm sure they have no regrets if you were to ask them. So I think it's just being able to go through the learning process, which just means that we don't always know how to do everything and that it's okay.