About the Author, Jon Sloan

I wrote the original version of The Tree in Mrs. Shields' 4th grade class (she's probably dead now). That version was obviously a little different than the version that is available now (it may have even been better), but the original idea is still there (some warriors get a magical tree and chaos ensues). 

I don't remember what the actual assignment Mrs. Shields gave me that inspired the story, but I do remember it was the first time I ever felt excited about writing. I ended up spending the entire morning and part of recess (sacrificing valuable tetherball time) writing five whole pages in the itty-bitty printing style I used when I was ten (I believed the smaller I wrote, the harder it was for my teachers to tell how bad my handwriting sucked). In that story, the tree shared its power with people when they pulled off a leaf, but the leaf-puller wouldn’t know what power it would give them until they pulled it. In the only part I actually remember, the knights were surrounded by monsters. One of the knights pulled off a leaf and then punched the ground, sending a shockwave through the ground that launched the monsters away, saving the knights from slaughter (that isn’t a spoiler. That scene isn’t in this book since, for better or worse, the tree now works quite a bit differently now). 

I have lost that original story, but I never lost the memory of it (well, not all of it) and in the back of my mind, I always thought it would be cool to turn into a real book. Fast forward over 30 years of time, thousands of hours of writing, editing, re-editing, rewriting, lost files, rewriting and re-editing again and, well, you get The Tree: A Boy Named Grex, and a man who never wants to write anything ever again.