It's not that easy to catch up with Kate DiCamillo, who has always been busy but who is even busier now that she's the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. She also still has all her other work to do — writing books (her new one is "Leroy Ninker Saddles Up"; review at left), giving talks (she's just back from the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., and before that she was in Red Wing, Minn., accepting the A.P. Anderson Award) and answering mail (including from me: this Q&A was done not by phone, but by e-mail).

Q: How's it going with your ambassadorship?

A: I don't know. How do you think it's going? Actually, I have relaxed a little bit about the whole thing and I am having fun with it. I have been kind of all over (from Las Vegas to Excelsior). And I am heading to South Dakota and Georgia and Missouri before the year is out. Everywhere I go, I keep working to remind people that it is a privilege and a joy to read. And that that joy is tripled, quadrupled, when we read together.

Q: With all that, how do you carve out time for your own work?

A: I've got a lot of people helping me to keep things in balance. There is time for writing and there is time for traveling and being with people and the two things (at least for me) seem to feed each other — being out in the world informs the stories, writing the stories helps me to be in the world.

Q: You sometimes post on Facebook letters from young readers. Do you answer all of them?

A: I do answer the letters. I send a postcard. I am just back from the National Book Festival in D.C. and two different kids came through the signing line holding postcards I had sent them. Both of them wanted to know if I remembered writing to them. And I did remember. It was a happy, happy thing for all of us.

Q: So your latest book is a sweet love story about Leroy Ninker, from the Mercy Watson books. Why Leroy? And what did you mean when you said (on the book flap) that he asked you to write a story about him?

A: I kept thinking about those Mercy Watson books and how much fun they were to write. I was looking for a way back in to telling stories about Deckawoo Drive and Leroy said "yippie-i-oh" and that seemed like a request to me.

Q: What would you tell people who say that writing books for kids is easy, because there are so few words?

A: Wheeeeeeee. Whoop. I would say: Please teach me how to do it. I would so love for it to be easy.

Laurie Hertzel is the Star Tribune books editor. Twitter: @StribBooks