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As many of you already know, my poem, "A Place to Share", is going to be included in the forthcoming anthology from Kane Miller, edited by Jill Corcoran.

Today, Jill released the full line-up of the thirty participating poets, as well as confirming that the book is going to be illustrated by J Beth Jepson.

Can I tell you how lucky I feel to be part of that lineup?

Emails of good news are always something I look forward to.  Yesterday, I got two of them. The Institute of Children’s Literature’s Web Editor Jan Fields has taken two more articles from me for their newsletter. One article will appear in November 2010 and the other will appear in December 2010.

Smories.com @ http://www.smories.com
If you have an unpublished children’s story, you can submit it here.
We are offering US$1,500 worth of prize money for the 5 best stories submitted each month.
The current competition closes 30 April 2010.
You can submit from anywhere in the world.
Submission is free.

50 SHORTLISTED, 5 WILL WIN

A shortlist of the 50 stories we like best will be announced on 05 May.
These 50 stories will then get narrated by kids, which we film.
The 50 films will then appear on smories.com on 01 June.
To remove bias, film positioning on the channel will be randomised every time the page is opened.
Viewers will be able to rate the stories .
After a month, 5 winners will be announced based on a combination of number of views and average ratings.
This cycle will be repeated every month. Yay!

PRIZES

First Prize: US$500
Second Prize: US$400
Third Prize: US$300
Fourth Prize: US$200
Fifth Prize: US$100

We are receiving submissions from all over the world.
If you are a winner outside the US, the prize money will be converted into your local currency.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Not be longer than 750 (seven hundred and fifty) words.
Text only, in English.
Must be fiction for children from 3 to 8 years old.
Poetry & rhyming stories may also be submitted.
You must be the writer or owner of the copyright.
A maximum of two stories per writer per month can be submitted.
Typos, syntax and grammatical errors will prejudice your chances of selection.
No redrafts accepted. Final versions only.

SELECTION PROCESS & KEY DATES

05 May 2010: Shortlist of the 50 stories announced.
01 June 2010: The completed films will simultaneously appear on the smories online channel.
30 June 2010: The 5 stories receiving the highest traffic & ratings over the preceding 30 days will win the prizes.

RIGHTS AND COPYRIGHT

Stories will appear online on the smories channel only (www.smories.com).
Full credit and copyright will be attributed to the writer.
All rights will remain with the writer.
Stories can be removed from the smories channel at any time at the behest of the writer.
Smories.com will hold no claim to the story in any form.

See our FAQ page (accessed via the menu bar above) for more detailed explanation of Rights.

I love this post. My friend Bonnie is not only smart and helpful, she’s funny,too.  She  co-host two chats on twitter. She co-host with Greg Pincus for #kidlitchat on Tuesdays and is also the co-host of #kidlitart on Thursdays with Lyon Martin.

Over the River and Through the Woods

By Bonnie Adamson

When Peg asked me to guest blog about the unique perspective of a writer/illustrator, I immediately thought of hats. I often talk about wearing my writer hat or my illustrator hat–or my designer hat, since I spent a huge chunk of my professional career as a graphic designer.

I tried to picture myself in these hats, working on a story I wanted to write and illustrate. Were the hats perched one on top of the other? Which one did I put on first?

I realized I had stumbled upon a truth about how I work: I don’t wear more than one hat at a time. With me, it’s first one, then the other.

At this point, I was going to move on to a dance metaphor, but that implies a creative process that is much too elegant and refined.

The truth is, two (or three) areas of my brain are constantly bickering like whiny kids on a long car trip with no onboard DVD player. Squabbling siblings! At last, an analogy I could get behind.

Most of my story ideas come first in the form of words: titles, phrases, rhymes or alliterations, some sort of word play. I should stop here and clarify, because I’ve been known to say that my story ideas start with a drawing, usually a tiny pencil sketch. What happens is that the word-association falls flat and plays dead if I can’t develop some sort of image from it.

So the initial conversation goes something like this:

Writer-brain: Crocodile’s Song!

Illustrator-brain: Cool! Green, bumpy thing holding a microphone.

Writer-brain [let’s call her Gwendolyn]: The other animals—

Illustrator-brain [she likes to be called Pookie]: Wait—OTHER animals? Hard-to-draw animals, like, um, zebras?

Gwendolyn: Zebras! What fun. Let’s go research African wildlife.

Pookie: Hold on: is this a jungle or American Idol? I thought the crocodile was SINGING–ooh, I know! He’s in a tuxedo on the deck of a ship—

Gwendolyn: Don’t be ridiculous. This is a bedtime story about sleepy animals.

Pookie: Hmmph. Sounds boring. Unless . . . we could put all the animals in polka-dot jammies—

Gwendolyn: That would be highly inaccurate.

Pookie: Says you.

At which point the different areas of my brain begin insulting one another, and I go make myself a cup of tea while I consider a different career.

The above conversation is a fairly accurate account of the internal arguments over one idea (titled, oddly enough, “Crocodile’s Song”), which after ten years (!) is still trailing around after me, generating file-folders full of revisions and refusing to earn its keep. Gwendolyn and Pookie have never been able to agree on images to match the words, or words to match the images—which also explains why there are lots of crocodiles and sleepy jungle animals who live in my portfolio and will never find another home.

Occasionally, an idea comes along that both Gwendolyn and Pookie can get excited about. This doesn’t mean that I will end up submitting text and art as a package, but it does mean that I have workable images in my head that help me structure the story: sometimes the images are stati

They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. I just realized after I posted this that I got the quote wrong. That is how it has been for me, this year at least. It’s fast and furious.

I’m busier than I have ever been before. Of course, most of it is stuff I brought on myself. It’s a fine line balancing a personal life and a writing life and sometimes I have a tendency to want to do both extremely well at the same time.

On the personal front:

Helping to raise kids means dealing with the stuff that comes up in every day situations like getting homework done, or having friends over, or making sure they have clean clothes, etc. It means I have to teach them to pick up after themselves so that they, the two boys, aren’t total slobs. I tell them someday their girlfriends and wives will thank them and me but that doesn’t mean they believe me. They’re only 9 and 11, after all. The good news is they are more helpful than I had thought they would be.

They have challenges that make consistency a must. The older of the two has ADD and the youngest has Aspergers. Helping a sibling with raising his sons is doable but does require patience and lots of planning at times. I’m on a first name basis with most of the teachers, secretaries and other school personnel. I have a huge wall calendar that holds all of the upcoming events. I get emails on a daily basis from the school so that I can track grades, etc. The good news is the boys are doing well.

On the writing front:

Then, there is the uphill struggle to have a writing career. I’m determined to do it but the road has been a long and winding one.

I love writing so that part is the easy part for me. The hard part is chiseling out time for writing. I need time to read, research and write my own stories and books. I need time to find articles, tips, blogsites to recommend and people to interview.  The good news is I have never needed a lot of sleep so project are getting done.

All these add their own extra work. For example, once I find people to interview, there’s research on the person, interview questions to write and revise, photos to locate and getting the pull-together interview posted. The good news is that I have several interviews lined up for the next few months.

I’m involved in three critique groups and they take time. I want to give as good as I get if not more. The good news is that I’m the type of person who needs a deadline and there are plenty of those in these groups. The other good news that I’m encouraged to submit my work and am getting it accepted.

 

These are some of Nina's reasons for writing for children. She's a devoted wife, mother and grandmother.

This is the Part Two of the Nina Johnson interview. Part Three is appearing tomorrow.

Peg:    I’ll bet there are lots of women who would like a husband as supportive of them as yours is of you.

Nina:  My husband said to me one day, “ Nina, you have spent these last years helping me get my company on it’s feet, now I want you to do what you have always wanted to do.” I asked him what that might be since I had no idea what I always wanted to do.  He said, “You want to write children’s books!”

I was completely surprised and said, “I do?  How do you know that, since I don’t even know what I want to do?”

He told me that it was obvious to him since I had spent so much time making stories out of our everyday experiences and that I had told so many to our grandchildren.

Even though I had not thought of it that way, I could see that he had a point. When he allowed me to turn over my job at the company to an employee, I suddenly felt free to write. I spent hours putting the stories that had always been in my head down on paper. I was overflowing with stories of all kinds. It was like the damn had broken and I was pouring out my heart and soul. I woke up at night to write. I stopped in the middle of making dinner to write. I even got a recorder so I could get my story ideas down as I was driving.

Peg:    Those are great tips for beginning writers.

Nina:  I emptied the back half of my walk in closet and made a writing space for me! My husband assembled a desk in there and added electricity and an Internet connection. I asked him not to add a phone line so as no to interfere with my writing.

I will always be grateful to my wonderful, thoughtful and observant husband for helping me to find my way to what I truly needed to do. 

Peg:    We share a love of picture book writing but have you done books in other genres?

Nina:  I am writing a middle grade sci-fi right now. It is very different than picture books in that you have the luxury of writing more words to get the story across. However, it is more complicated as well.

I’m just learning about writing and all that goes into it so it will be very interesting as time goes by how this experience will ultimately compare to writing picture books.

Peg:    You told me that you are a story teller, but what type, genre, was your first written piece?

Nina:  The stories that really made my husband realize my desire was the Grandfather Clock stories that I tell my grandchildren. They are interactive stories in that my grandchildren often contribute to and change the path of the story as we go along.

I guess the first story that I wrote was Marshall Muskrat about the muskrat in our pond on our property.  The most wonderful experience of my life was reading “Marshall Muskrat’s Easter Surprise” to my gr