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My next book, I Had A Favorite Dress, is considered a "fall release", but the actual pub date is August 1st- which is really, really soon! I am so excited for this book to come out- it is one of the favoritest things I've ever written. It was inspired by my daughter, Lily, and it is dedicated to her as "my favoritest girly-girl." Although the voice of the main character is most likely my own (circa 1975), I was never-not-ever a "girly" girl (and neither is my other daughter), so this book is really pure Lily.
The first review, from Kirkus, which you can read in full here, just came in... and it's good! They call it "a charming interpretation of an old story that will speak to young fashionistas." Whew! I could not be more pleased with my first-ever Kirkus review :)
Lastly, if you've never checked out the blog of illustrator Julia Denos, now is the perfect time to do so. She is posting some of the lovely art from our book and has an all-around nifty blog that you don't want to miss. It is positively a feast for your eyes!
If you want to get your kids, or someone else's kids, or anyone for that matter, interested in poetry, get a copy of this book by Bob Raczka.
It is wonderful! Reading the poems is sort of like putting a puzzle together, which is at least half the fun as you race through the whole book. Once you read them all through, you get a wonderful sense of accomplishment- they are short and simple, but so tricky! Then you will probably admire just how deceptively complex they really are. And go back through and study them.
And then your kids, or someone else's kids, or you for that matter, will want to sit down immediately with a pen and paper and write one of your own. Which is the best way to honor a wonderful book like this!
Spend some time with kids and poetry this month- you'll be glad you did.
My next book, I Had A Favorite Dress, won't be out until this fall, but here's a sneak peak at the cover, illustrated by the super-talented Julia Denos:
The best thing about being a children's book author? I think I'd have to go with what I'll loosely term "reader mail". Questions from kids, their artwork based on my books, thank-you's after a school visit... any and all of it is so awesome!
I recently received a package of letters from a teacher down in Wisconsin with whom I had corresponded when my first book, Hush, Little Dragon, came out a couple of years ago. I had sent her class a signed copy of Over At The Castle and a bundle of signed bookmarks and they sent me a huge envelope of awesome (I definitely got the better end of that deal!) Here's a peek at some of the contents:
Dragons by Dalen
Patrick wants to know if it's hard being an author? Well Patrick, some of the things I have to do as an author are hard, at least for me. Like speaking in front of people about my books- that was really hard at first! But it's gotten a lot easier over time and now I really enjoy it :) The writing part can be frustrating, sometimes, but I don't think of it as being hard because I love it so much!
Thyler wants to know "how long it took you to wright Over At The Castle?" Thyler, I got the idea and wrote the basic story very quickly for this particular book- about two days, I think. But then I spent a couple of weeks revising my rough draft before it was ready to send to my editor. During revision, I would make sure all the words are spelled correctly, like if I had accidentally said "wright" when I meant "write"... things like that. (wink)
Kendall writes that "I liked Over At The Castle and Hush, Little Dragon because there about dragons and dragons are my 5th favorite animal." Hey Kendall, I have a question for YOU: What are your first, second, third and fourth favorite animals?? You piqued my curiosity with that statement, and that's what writers do- they make their readers curious enough to keep reading! Maybe you'll be a writer someday...
Art by Natasha.
Natasha says that she is a "new kid around here" and hasn't even read my books yet. That's okay, Natasha, thanks for sending me a Thank You anyway. And that's one of the BEST dragons I've received yet- nice work!
So, I think you can see why reader mail makes my job SO worth it.
Many, many thanks to Ms. Pisani's 3rd grade class!!
So far, I've showcased books by authors I love, or illustrators I love, or debut books that I'm totally judging by the cover (or description) and which look amazing and/or intriguing. After all, that's usually how our audience picks their books, right?
A few of the books have been by people I sort-of "know", whether I've met them at a conference, or online, or whatever- hey, children's publishing is a small world :) This may or may not have influenced how much I'm looking forward to their books. But I do have to confess that the first book below is by someone I actually know. And I've even already read it (if only in manuscript form) (and I *loved* it!), so I'm even more sure that you should check it out :)
(And the second book, you may notice, is illustrated by the illustrator of one of MY 2011 releases! How did she know Audrey Hepburn is one of my all-time favorite actresses??)
Let's face it- this year is going to be over before we know it. I hate how fast time flies the older I get. And there is pretty much only one reason I would ever wish time to march faster- so I could get my hands on books I'm looking forward to!
As you probably know, I'm something of a research nut. My bookshelves are full. My "To-Read" shelf on Goodreads is huge. I keep the inter-library loan service at my local library ridiculously busy. And I love giving book suggestions to other people and getting them excited about books!
While I'm busy trimming the tree and making reindeer cookies and working on my WIP (from a PiBoIdMo idea! Day #12, to be exact...) in the coming weeks, I thought I'd give YOU something to look forward to with me in the New Year. My peek into 2011 will be heavy on releases for the first half of the year, of course, because those are the ones that have info online already, but (ahem) there are gonna be some terrific fall releases too :)
So, what's whetting my appetite for 2011?
Al Pha's Bet Al Pha's Bet by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Delphine Durand
Noodle And Lou Noodle And Lou by Liz Garton Scanlon and Arthur Howard
Spinster Goose Spinster Goose by Lisa Wheeler and Sophie Blackall
It was smart. It was funny. It spoke to kids. It was amazing. I wanted to do that! (Of course, I still haven't done *that*, but that's a different blog post...)
Then he went and wrote a bunch of other books because, apparently, I wasn't the only person who liked that book. Some of these other books I loved, some I liked, some I didn't like as much. It's that way with most authors, no? I don't hold it against the guy- it's a rare person who can be brilliant every time at bat.
just when I was bemoaning the lack of easy readers that interested my son. This book and My Friend Is Sad, the next Elephant & Piggie book, taught my son to read. Oh thank you, Mo Willems! I owe you my next-born son (which, thankfully I'll never have, so I won't have to go giving him away to Mo Willems or anything...).
So, we literally devoured the subsequent Elephant & Piggie books that came out, even after we had no excuse to "need" to read them. So wonderful, so charming. Are You Ready To Play Outside? is a particular favorite of mine. And then, you know, we hit a few that we didn't exactly love as much as others... and, very, very secretly, I started to gloat a teeeeeny, tiny little bit- It's hard, isn't it, Mr. Brilliant, to come up with home runs every time at bat, I think I might have said to myself once or twice. But not when anyone could hear me, of course. I mean, the man DID write Don't Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus.
In any case, I was starting to be a bit relieved that that ol' Mo Willems wasn't super-human. Until I read this:
and now I feel a bit like Charlie Brown, lying flat on his back, at the mercy of that mad-genius Lucy and her football-yanking ways. That ol' Mo Willems just came up with the BEST Elephant & Piggie book yet!! It's charming. It's funny. It's perfect. It's mad-genius, is what it is. If you haven't read it yet, please do so as soon as possible. You want to be in on one of the *best* books of the year.
It's Day 12 of PiBoIdMo, and I must say, this is turning out to be a very interesting experiment. I am forcing myself to come up with one idea a day, knowing that I won't be able to capitalize on it right away. Okay, I fell off the wagon around Days 8 and 9, but I hopped right back on and caught up.
This is the opposite of the way I usually write, by the way. Normally I seize the idea and write until I block, then I do something boring and mundane, like mop my floors or fold laundry until I un-block, then write-and-repeat until I have a story. If I get halfway on a WIP and LIFE interrupts, I often lose the enthusiasm for the project for awhile (which could be anywhere from weeks to months to years!). Sometimes I pick it back up, sometimes not.
But with these ideas, some of them are, I think, pretty good. And I'm anxious to get started on a few of them, um, now. So the anticipation is really building, and my subconscious is kind of working on a few of them while I'm not writing (November = no writing time!). That subconscious thing is really important- often I don't give the idea time to simmer in the background and seize it too fast and it doesn't produce.
And honestly, I never would have focused my mind enough through all the current chaos around here to even come up with one or two ideas, let alone 30. Of course, we'll see how it plays out once I get my writing time back. If I have 30 ideas staring me in the face and I can't come up with anything, I won't be so in love with PiBoIdMo.
But right now, I'm thinking this whole thing is pretty awesome- and Tara Lazar? Genius.
November is a REALLY busy month around here. I chair our Book Fair (and go WAY above and beyond for it, I might add...) and my daughter is in the Christmas Carol production at her dance studio and has a ton of rehearsals and my son has basketball and my other son has a ton of teaching requirements at his karate dojo every November and yes, there are a MILLION excuses for me to NOT write and NOT participate in something as awesome as PiBoIdMo... and that's *exactly* why I've signed up to do it this year!
I have sold 6 picture books in 5 and 1/2 years of writing and yes, even I need motivation sometimes. So I am in, Tara Lazar. I'm getting my Idea Book ready. Bring on the PiBoIdMo... (and thank you, Tara Lazar, for the butt-kicking!!!!) (Oh, my god, what have I done???!)
Urgh- I'm being besieged by spam comments! It's been going on for over a week and they've been innocuous so far (no, I don't want to send my readers to your site to buy cheap fake purses!), but now they've started to get, um, inappropriate, and that's not something I can tolerate on a blog that might be visited by children. And I am spending more time blocking and deleting the spammers than I am blogging! Which is *stupid*, and banning and Captcha are not stopping them anyway. It's completely ridiculous. And yes, I'm *really* annoyed!
SO, for the time being, the near-future, the who-knows-how-long-but-until-they-go-away, I've disabled comments on my blog. I'll still be blogging! I have too many opinions to keep to myself- ha! And if you need to tell me something, I'm still readily available on twitter, facebook, goodreads, or e-mail (you probably know where to find me, but check my website if you don't). Believe me, I'm still here and I still want to hear what anyone (any REAL person) has to say- it'll just take an extra click to tell me for now...
(My daughter has been lost in this last one for the last three days- we hope to see her again soon...)
Good books coming out this fall, yes? Lots of excellent, boy-friendly sequels and new beginnings we've been waiting for-ever for (or at least it seems like it). So get yourself to a bookstore and pick up a good fall read (or just click on the covers above- I even made it easy for you!)
I can't do it. I can't just stay quiet and say nothing about the New York Times article. I write and read and breathe picture books and that article made me so sad. You can go here or here or here or here to see excellent rebuttals and counterpoints to the article itself.
Personally, I believe in picture books for many, many reasons- and a lot of them are mentioned in those posts, so I won't duplicate here. But I also think picture books are an excellent resource for teaching writing and I don't think I saw that addressed anywhere so I wanted to mention it. When I read picture books to my kids, we talk about the story arc, the plot and the characterizations. We discuss what the text says, and what it doesn't say and leaves for the illustrator to say. We discuss how the story is told, the tone, the setting. We don't necessarily use the terminology because our reading time isn't school and I'm not teaching them writing. But they are absorbing all of the components of writing and how to do it well and they don't even know it. And it will show up in their own writing and they will be better writers for it.
At school visits, I go further. I do use the terminology and talk about the specific traits of writing: foreshadowing, onomatopoeia, rhyme, alliteration, word choice, organization of thoughts, etc, and I show them concrete examples from picture books. When I do it, you can actually see little light bulbs go on over their heads! It is so much easier to see and understand these concepts in the 32 pages of a picture book. Older elementary and middle schoolers connect to picture books- they are actually my favorite audience to read to! By denying older children the chance to read and study picture books, we are doing them a great disservice. So I'm going to continue to do my part- reading and writing and teaching picture books- and I hope you'll do the same.
This is one of the most practical things you can participate in if you want to write picture books. Seriously.
All the write-a-novel-in-a-month contests (NaNoWriMo and its variants) have, in my mind, drawbacks. The pressure, the quality issue, the fact that agents bemoan the glut of not-yet-ready submissions they receive directly afterward from eager, triumphant writers... In any case, it's not the way the writer within me works (she does *not* like pressure in the drafting stage!), so I'm not sure I'd ever participate in one of them.
But they're for novels anyway. Picture books are different. Obviously you CAN write one in a month- even less time than that, right (Please Note: I am sarcastically winking here)? But ideas? Sometimes months can go by while ideas (good ideas!) elude me. It's during those times that I break out my idea notebooks and troll for inspiration.
And that's what PiBoIdMo is all about! Brainstorm like mad for a brief time and you could possibly end up with a lifetime supply of writing ideas. It's genius, I tell you, genius. So get ready. Go check it out. It's coming....
Have you ever been to the Madison Children's Museum?? It just opened a month or so ago and I'll tell you, as someone who's attended her fair share of different children's museums over the last 20-odd years- this is one of the BEST I've ever been to. You must go.
It's amazing! Highly recommended by me AND my kids :)
All of the volunteers from the Book Festival and the staff from the Borders Book Store and the Museum were so nice, but too many names flew at me fast and furiously. Names are truly my Achilles Heel (with taking pictures right behind- why do I not remember??)! Ugh. But THANK YOU everyone who made things go so smoothly!
And then there was this huge Chicken Nugget that showed up, much to the (obvious) delight of my son Jack:
Josh Lewis, author of the Super Chicken Nugget Boy series is a funny guy- a really funny guy!- and my family and I all enjoyed meeting him very much. And if you are one of the people who didn't come to see us speak, then you also don't have one of these (not that I'm bragging):
As far as I'm concerned, the trip down was worth it just to get my hands on this sequel, which you can't get anywhere yet! Jack and I have already been duking it out to see who gets to read it first. I lost, but hey, it's fair play while he's in school, right...?
Earlier this year, Jen Robinson over at Jen Robinson's Book Page gave Over At The Castle a lovely review that pleased me to no end. She is a tireless supporter of children's books and literacy and her website and newsletter are terrific resources- I was so excited she liked my book!
And now, I owe her a big THANK YOU! (so THANK YOU Jennifer!) for nominating my book for the Cybils fiction picture-book award. I just got back from Wisconsin and haven't even nominated my favorites yet- I better get on that (if they haven't been nominated already!)
(Have you read this book? It is a fantastic early chapter book for reluctant readers- highly recommended! And seconded by my son, Jack, who laughed his way through it a few weeks ago.)
I just can't figure out how to make this post look like anything other than Chapter One from the Nepotist's Handbook. I want to shout out this wonderful book I just read, see, but it's published by my publisher. And my art director had a hand in it. And the illustrations are by someone who is illustrating one of my own upcoming books. (At least I don't know the author- ha!) (Okay, she's my facebook friend.) (And my goodreads friend.) (And I follow her on twitter.) (But I don't *know* her, I swear!)
And anyway, by now, hopefully, you know that I don't go on and on about a book unless I really AM in love with it, and I really AM in love with this one:
Dotty up-ended my expectations. How Ms. Perl can go from Chicken Butt! (her last picture book, which we thoroughly enjoyed, but I am not sure I would ever describe as "charming") to this lovely, charming story I'll never know. But I will remain in awe of her versatility forever.
Dotty is about imagination and friendship and growing up and letting go and *not* letting go and being yourself. The writing is nuanced and perfect and so is the ending. It's sweet without being saccharine, perfectly matched to the illustrations (which are so, so, SO good) and I want to put it into the hand of everyone I tell about it, knowing they will share the book with someone they love and then close the book with a smile on their face. Just as I did.
I know, you just got done reading the Picture Book Roundtable over at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, right? I hope, at least, that it was interesting! And I hope you also saw the *fabulous* breakfast Jules had with Julia Denos this week? Julia, as you probably know by now, is illustrating one of my books coming out next year, and she has a lot of sneak-peeks from it in her own Seven Imp interview- I could look at her artwork all day! So beautiful. (And I can't wait for that Audrey Hepburn biography- she's one of my favorite actresses!)
But anyway, if you aren't too Boni-Ashburned-out (hee-hee!), I recently did another interview over at Read-Write-Repeat. It's a lovely blog run by Pat Zietlow Miller, a writer from Wisconsin, that has interviews with authors (my pal Tammi Sauer recently stopped by too!) as well as a cool running feature- book reviews by kids. I love reading kids' reviews- they are so astute... So if you take a peek at my interview, make sure to take a look around- you'll be glad you did. And thanks for having me Pat!
I went on something of a mid-grade, summer-book kick late this summer. I read the Penderwicks last summer and just loved-loved-loved it and I was hoping to find another perfect summer read like that one. But I didn't just find one- I found four!
So summery, so wonderful! I adored every one of these books. They're all very well-written with charming characters and so good at establishing a place and a time. I just finished Turtle In Paradise, which has a story that takes place over a summer but culminates on Labor Day weekend- really good timing on that one! In fact, it was the perfect summer ending (thank you Jennifer L. Holm!)
In The Wild by David Elliott, illustrated by Holly Meade
Spectacular, bold illustrations, perfectly matched to fun, short, evocative poems. A companion book that's even better than the first one (2008's On The Farm, which I loved). Lovely. In The Wild left a big impression on me- add it to my list of favorite Caldecott contenders for this year!
