an Interview with Pam 
                                                                                                   

              Twins, Shrunken Treasure and Movie Stars, oh my!

  What possible trouble could twin eleven-year-old sisters get into on a harmless trip to Amsterdam? Plenty if the sisters are magicians, come from a circus family, and just happen to own a real magic coin. A coin that can change people and animals into other animals and then, Ka-poof! Right back again.

            The Trimoni Twins and the Shrunken Treasure, by Maryland author Pam Smallcomb, finds the Trimoni twins in Amsterdam, performing their act at the famous Merlin Hotel. But once they meet Wiliken Riebeeck, a teen movie star, and learn of a lost treasure from a Spanish galleon, the girls are plunged into a mysterious adventure that involves another magic coin: the Shrinking Coin.
            “I wanted to write the kind of book I loved to read when I was a kid,” Smallcomb says. “A book where the girls in the story have smarts and are self-reliant. I devoured mysteries when I was in grade school; I literally read several a week. So I’m happy that Beezel and Mimi Trimoni get to have the kind of fantastic exploits I was yearning to have growing up in Benbrook, Texas.”
            Smallcomb admits that the Changing Coin has given her plenty of opportunity to add humor to the Trimoni Twin stories. “It’s extremely fun to turn bad guys into warthogs, or rats,” she says. “And now with the Shrinking Coin, I can change them…and then shrink them!”
            Washington Parent magazine said of the first Trimoni Twin book “don't be surprised if your kids refuse to go to bed until they see what happens next…” Smallcomb admits that keeping the action high and adding mysterious elements wasn’t as hard for her as keeping track of the magic rules. “I just about drove my husband crazy with shrinking questions,” she says. “And I’m sure my editor had more than one headache because of me.” In her new book, the Shrinking Coin shrinks people and objects by twelfths. “Math was never my best subject.”
            The mother of four, Smallcomb says she has every kind of reader imaginable in her house. “I’ve got fantasy readers, anime readers, series readers, non-fiction readers…and a reluctant reader, but I won’t name names.”
            Has writing with four children in the house taught her time management? “No,” she says. “But it has taught me where all the good hiding places in the house are.”
 
            For more information on The Trimoni Twins and the Changing Coin (available in paperback now) and The Trimoni Twins and the Shrunken Treasure (released November 2005), visit pamsmallcomb.com or bloomsburyusa.com.