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Over 120 children's book writers and illustrators plus editors, agents, an art director, contests, an art display, hot fudge... what a fabulous Midsouth SCBWI conference this weekend!

My dancing penguins in their old-fashioned attire above won Honorable Mention in the illustration contest, and my manuscript won Honorable Mention in the picture book contest. Yay!

Some of my favorite notes from the conference:

As an example of using voice in manuscripts, Ruta Rimas (Balzer & Bray) rewrote Mo Willem's DON'T LET THE PIGEON DRIVE THE BUS without voice. Basically something like, "Once there was a pigeon with big googly eyes. A mean man wouldn't let him drive a bus but the pigeon really wanted to..." Then Ruta read the actual text of the book with the pigeon pleading and yelling at us. Wow. So much more effective and playful.

"Put every word on trial for its life," from the book READING LIKE A WRITER by Francine Prose.

Is your picture book manuscript strong enough to carry an $18 price tag? - Diane Muldrow (Random House).

From the first pages session by Agents Kelly Sonnack and Linda Pratt:
Text and illustrations are a comic duo - the text is the setup man for the illustrations.
Books don't need to teach imagination to kids. They already have it!
Too much description in an action scene slows down the pacing. Keep the action building with forward momentum.
Make your reader feel smart. They shouldn't have to reread to get it.

From an art session by Patti Ann Harris (Senior Art Director, Little, Brown) and Diane Muldrow (Editorial Director, Random House):
Your character needs to be strong, winning, and loveable but not necessarily likeable.
Patti Ann will go to illustrators' websites, pull some jpgs, and print them on a sheet with the illustrator's name for her files, so you need a portfolio website.
Be yourself on your website. Don't overdo it with Flash and things that take awhile to load and are distracting.
Emotional resonance is key in illustrations.
It's all about the character. Everyone can draw a car, but not everyone can draw a character with strong personality/humor/emotion.
Mailers need to have focus, kind of like a book cover. It should grab you from across the room, and shouldn't be too busy.
Study online PDFs of catalogs from different publishers to understand the "look" of each publisher.

The only sad part of the weekend was my continued cupcake tragedy. The conference is held across the street from Gigi's Cupcakes. Last year I was pregnant and I waited until after dinner to try to satisfy my huge cupcake craving. It was too late - the cupcake shop was closed! This year I vowed to get my hands on those cupcakes before dinner, but the shop closed even earlier this year and so I didn't get them again! Next year, you cupcakes will be MINE!

This past weekend was the Midsouth SCBWI conference in Nashville for children's book writers and illustrators. I won the illustration contest there - whoo hoo! The Art Director from Henry Holt, Patrick Collins, gave the illustrators text from a couple picture book manuscripts, and we painted a spread from one of the books for the contest. The text on my illustration above is from the picture book, Don't Lick the Dog, written by Wendy Wahman.

The conference was fabulous and I intend to blog some of my notes next week. Right now I'm heading out on a roadtrip to the Highlights for Children Illustrator's Weekend and to visit friends on the way. Highlights magazine hosts an Illustrator's Weekend every year where they invite their illustrators to eastern Pennsylvania to relax, view portfolios, square dance, and get dressed up in crazy costumes. I'm excited!

This past weekend I attended the Midsouth SCBWI Conference in Nashville, TN. This region seriously puts on amazing conferences! Here are some of my notes:

Bruce Coville (author of more than 90 books)
I've loved Bruce's books that I've read and listened to. He's such a super dynamic and animated speaker. If you ever get a chance to hear him, go, go, go!
HA! WA! YIKES! If you can get all three of these reactions in your reader, you've written a great book.
HA! Kids love humor. How do you get a laugh? Use one of the following words: fart, booger, butt, naked, etc. But the best laugh is one that comes from the story itself. For example, a bully gets puts into his place.
WA! An honest tear. Easy tear - kill the dog. But the best tear comes from the story itself. For example, tears of joy when something so wonderful happens.
YIKES! Kids love scary books. The best scary is when a character you love is in trouble, emotional peril.
Use sensory details to sweep you into a scene. In any important scene, use 3 of the 5 senses.
Make a good story a great story by making your character face a tough moral choice. The question kids have is not, "Do I want to be good?" but rather, "Who do I want to be like?" Provide role models.
"Sometimes I write a fairytale because it's the best way to tell the truth." - C.S. Lewis

Victoria Jamieson (designs picture books, middle grade, and YA for Greenwillow)
Victoria has a website with her own illustration work, and she has a fun picture book coming out next summer, Bea Rocks the Flock!
She prefers illustrators to send in postcard samples of their artwork, not envelopes that she has to open.
Have a web portfolio where she can find more of your work, and she can print it out.
If you like a particular subject or type of book, do at least 3 illustrations like that for your portfolio.
Victoria showed us some picture book dummies which I found very helpful since I would like to write and illustrate my own picture books.
She talked about Darcy Pattison's Narrative Arc Formula:
This is a story about ______________________________
Who more than anything else wants __________________
(Alternate: Who more than anything else fears_________________)
But can’t get it because of these complications:
(Alternate: But has to face it because of these complications:)
UNTIL (climax/resolution).

Amalia Ellison (Assistant Editor at Abrams)
Why have an agent: Agents protect you in ways you don't realize until it's too late.
If you don't want an agent: query the assistant and associate editors and editorial assistants if they have aquiring ability. They are the ones who will be passionate about your books and will work on building a relationship with you because your success means success for them.
Amalia prefers email submissions with manuscripts as attachments (go green). If she feels your writing is great, but it's not what she's interested in, she'll pass it around the office. Amalia loves mysteries, math mysteries, and humorous adventure books - so do I! She was quite funny and a good storyteller.

I had a portfolio critique with Victoria Jamieson at this conference. Last fall, I had portfolio critiques with Laurent Linn from Henry Holt and Elizabeth Parisi from Scholastic, and I've been putting into practice all that they said about art for trade book publishing. I feel like my artwork has really grown over the past year, but I know I still have a lot of growing to do. I was excited to see what the comments would be at my critique this year, because most of the illustrations in my portfolio are new. There was one piece in my portfolio that an Art Director had said was my strongest piece two years ago. That was one of the only two illustrations that Victoria told me this weekend to take out of my portfolio now. How encouraging! What had been my strongest piece two years ago is now my weakest piece! Most of my new pieces are stronger, so that verified my growth as an artist. Yay!
These two illustrations Victoria pointed out as being some of my strongest:



Harold Underdown and Alexis O'Neill also spoke at the conference. If you're interested in writing or illustrating for children, I highly suggest digesting all of Harold's website and checking out his book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Children's Book Publishing. Also, join SCBWI and go to some of these amazingly helpful conferences!

Here's a photo taken by Frank Lyne from the conference I describe below. Left to right on the panel: Henry Holt Associate Art Director Laurent Linn who is answering a question, Author Jaime Adoff, Editor Jennifer Wingertzahn (Clarion Books), Literary agent Ginger Clark from Curtis Brown, Ltd., and last is our keynote speaker, SCBWI co-founder, Executive Director, and author Lin Oliver. Candie Moonshower is the moderator standing at the podium.
My head is the curly one in the foreground in the audience.

These last couple of weeks there has been some bad flooding in parts of the UK and I was very sad to hear from author and publisher Debjani Chatterjee that her independent Sahitya Press has been badly affected, with the loss of their books stored in a community centre in Sheffield. Our thoughts go out to her and her colleagues.

In an interview with PaperTigers a few months ago, Debjani talked about how certain stories crop up in many different traditions: one of these is the Great Flood. There are many versions of Noah’s Ark, which we enjoy reading - but this week was the first time my boys had come across the story outside its biblical context and they were intrigued. We are reading Atticus the Storyteller’s 100 Greek Myths by Lucy Coats and Anthony Lewis, which we all agree is a “superb retelling of the Greek myths for younger children” and “a really lovely book for all the family to share” (Books for Keeps). Like in The Barefoot Book of Knights I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the stories are brought together by a narrator: here it’s Atticus, who is on his way (more…)