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12 Ontario School Library Association Meet the Author DAVID SKUY TingL: According to your biography on the Scholastic website, you started writing the Game Time series because you wanted to recreate the types of books you loved as a kid. In what ways did your consideration of boys' interests help you to develop your characters and stories? Perhaps the most obvious influence, from the perspective of writing books boys and girls would like to read, was to make sure Game Time represented an authentic experience -- in this case how a boy, charlie Joyce, dealt with coming to a new town after the loss of his father. Game Time used hockey as the hook in that charlie loved hockey and it is through his love for the game that he is able to heal and feel settled in his new surroundings. My challenge was to make my readers feel charlie's experience themselves -- so they could relate to him on an emotional level -- to put it bluntly, so they could smell the dressing room! I felt that if my readers could relate to charlie Joyce and what he was going through, and how charlie felt as a hockey player, then boys (and girls) would be interested in the books. Do you remember your favorite childhood authors and books? I tended to be very narrow in my reading until I became a teen. I read sports books and Award-winning YA author David Skuy is the focus of this issue's author profile. Among Skuy's awards is the 2012 Forest of Reading® Silver Birch® for fiction, for Undergrounders. Fall 2015 saw the release of two new sequels, Last Shot, (following up the best-selling Rocket Blues), and The Beautiful Game, the next book in the Silver Birch-nominated Striker series.