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by Deborah Freedman

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Photo by Chris Randall (http://www.ilovenewhaven.org)

Deborah is giving away a signed copy of THE STORY OF FISH & SNAIL.

This prize will be given away at the conclusion of PiBoIdMo. You are eligible for this prize if:

1. You have registered for PiBoIdMo. TODAY IS THE LAST DAY TO DO SO!
2. You have commented ONCE ONLY on today’s post.
3. You have completed the PiBoIdMo challenge. (You will have to sign the PiBoIdMo Pledge at the end of the event.)

Good luck, everyone!

“NOW SEEDS, START GROWING!”
Frog came running up the path.
“What is all this noise?” he asked.
“My seeds will not grow,” said Toad.
“You are shouting too much,” said Frog. “These poor seeds are afraid to grow.”

“These poor seeds are afraid to grow.” Wait… seeds can be afraid to grow? I didn’t know that. I wonder if that is my problem. Are you talking to me too, Frog? Can stories be afraid to grow, too?

Maybe I am shouting too much: Now ideas, start GROWING—what will the critique buddies think? what will mr. agent, ms. editor think? what will bookstores, kirkus, random readers on goodreads think? what if I never, never have a good idea again? OMG! that really could happen! please, please, ideas—GROW, GROW, GROW!

Help—TOAD—I can’t stop the shouting! Where are you? What would YOU do?

Toad read a long story to his seeds.
All the next day Toad sang songs to his seeds.
And all the next day Toad read poems to his seeds.
And all the next day Toad played music for his seeds.
Then Toad felt very tired, and he fell asleep.

Oh! These all sound like easy things to do… thank you Toad, I will do them! I will read stories and poems and play music. And then maybe I will also look at art, and walk in the woods and stop on the footbridge to play Poohsticks. And then plant things, bake things, make things… make anything but books.

And then finally, I will lie on the couch and stare out the window, until… until there is no more shouting and it is quiet… except for some birds (what’s the gossip today, guys?), and a couple of squirrels (hey, what is the problem out there? stop bickering!), and my cat, Milo, snoring.

I will try all of these things because I have read, and read over many times again, FROG AND TOAD TOGETHER by Arnold Lobel, so I know that in “The Garden”—spoiler alert!!!—once Toad stops shouting, his seeds really do grow in the end. Hopefully, if I’m quiet and patient too, my ideas will stop being afraid to sprout, and if I have a good one—hooray!!—I will jot or sketch it down right away. And then, at last, I can reward myself by taking a lesson from the next chapter of Frog and Toad: “Cookies”.

Toad baked some cookies.
“These cookies smell very good,” said Toad.
He ate one.
“And they taste even better…”

Hey, did you have an idea today? Well then, have a cookie! And by the way, what do you do, to coax your ideas to grow?

Once-upon-a-time, Deborah Freedman was an architect, but now she prefers to build worlds in books. She is the author and illustrator of SCRIBBLE and BLUE CHICKEN, and THE STORY OF FISH AND SNAIL, to be published in June 2013, by Viking. Follow her adventures at Writes With Pictures or on Facebook and Twitter @DeborahFreedman.

And lucky you, it’s time to win something AGAIN! Deborah is giving away a signed copy of her book BLUE CHICKEN!

Just comment to be entered (one comment per person).

A winner will be randomly selected in one week.

Good luck! 

Blue Chicken
By Deborah Freedman
Viking (an imprint of Penguin)
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-670-01293-0
Ages 4-8
On shelves September 15th

Call it barnyard self-actualization. Too heavy an idea for a picture book? Fine. How about breaking down the barn’s fourth wall? Or nine barnyard characters in search of an illustrator? However you want to couch it, I think we can probably state for the record that by this point any picture book that shows drawn characters taking on a life of their own is fairly par for the course. It’s not a particularly new or shocking idea. Mischievous chickens are also par for the course. No one can be all THAT surprised by their antics. That said, though these are ideas that make it into children’s books from time to time, until now I’ve not seen anyone specifically combine the two into a single book. Blue Chicken turns out to be the natural descendant of these two notions. Part barnyard antics, part surreal adventure, Deborah Freedman at last returns with a picture book that uses a minimum of words to create for us a fairly complex notion.

On a rainy day on a desk in a home sits an unfinished painting of a sleepy barnyard scene. Curious, one of the chickens in the picture notices the nearby jars of paint just outside of the frame. Unfortunately for her, this natural curiosity leads to an unprecedented spill that threatens to cover every animal in the picture. The ducklings are fairly cool about it, but the other creatures are distinctly displeased. In her effort to make things right, the chicken comes across a clear liquid that manages to wipe out all the unwanted blue except in the sky above. Content, the animals settle down back again. Only the final image in the book suggests where the chicken might be poking her nosy little beak next.

Now normally when drawn characters take their lives into their own hands, the story makes it very clear that these are characters in a book, breaking free of the shackles of the printed page. What’s interesting about Deborah Freedman’s book is that she prefers to imagine worlds where people do the drawing, coloring, and painting. In her previous book, Scribble, the drawings of two little girls come to life and get a little wild across the page. Likewise, in Blue Chicken it’s a drawing on a barnyard that contains all the requisite characters. Freedman isn’t tempted to challenge the very notion of reading a book like David Wiesner did in The Three Pigs or Mordecai Gerstein in A Book.