Judy Blume: Booksellers are more aware. So we went out there and stayed for several months and they wouldn't let me anywhere near it.
R.L. Stine: They absolutely won’t accept an unhappy ending.
Blume: It’s about fear. But I'm meeting very different readers.
Stine: I’ve done every story you could possibly do, I think.
Blume: I’m just the opposite.
***
Stine: My wife always tells me I need a hobby but I don’t have one.
Blume: Because I've always thought I was going to die tomorrow because my father died young.
Stine: Except, I used to live in this tiny little house that was one block from the Ohio governor’s mansion so we used to trick-or-treat there and every year he gave out apples.
Blume: It doesn't work that way at all in real life. It wasn’t sitcom.
Stine: It was humiliating. But I’m happy to scare people with clowns.
***
Blume: You're going to make me tell you?
Stine: No, not at all. My teachers begged me to stop.
Blume: Something will be offensive to someone in every book, so you've got to fight it.
Stine: It’s what inspires Carly Beth to go out and find a scary mask when her mother brings her a duck costume in the beginning of the book.
Blume: You know: hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry.