Fran Hawk's favorite things are children, books, and writing. Writing children's books is her dream come true, because it combines all three. Fran resides in South Carolina, and when the famous Hunley submarine was raised from Charleston harbor, she wrote a children's book about the event. Her next book was called Ten Tips for Raising Readers, in which Fran shares all the best information she had gathered about bringing children and books together. One autumn afternoon, Fran was walking as leaves drifted down all around her. She realized she only knew the names of a few of them, so she got some leaf books from the library and worked on identifying them. Then, she thought it would be interesting to write a children's book that would make it fun to learn the names of leaves. The result was Count Down to Fall.