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Happy Fusenews day to you, guv’nor.  In today’s episode we tip our hat to a post last week that is probably my most popular of all time.  Who knew knitting needles could be such lightning rods?  In any case, on with the newz!

How old is the picture book biography as we know it today?  Recently I’ve been thinking long and hard about what its purpose is, as well as its limitations.  Jacqueline Davies has thought longer and harder in some ways, though, since her recent post Writers and the Real Estate Market takes a very personal look at the choices she made when she wrote The Boy Who Drew Birds.  She makes some remarkably interesting points about content and format.

Boy, it must be hard.  Every year, without fail, Marjorie Ingall (Mamaleh Knows Best) scours the publishing world for great Jewish-centric books for kids.  The pickings are almost always slim, but once in a while you get some really good biographies. Picture book biographies (I sense a theme to today’s post) no less.  The first is of the current Ruth Bader Ginsberg bio in the piece Teaching Kids the Value of Dissent and the other Rich Michelson’s most recent bio in Leonard Nimoy’s Fascinating Life.  Great books.  Great write-ups.

Librarians.  We have one of those professions where it’s pretty clear that whenever we appear in the news, 50% of the time it’s not about something good.  Case in point, the recent news about a thrifty library cataloger who donated $4 million to his employer after his death.  His employer, however, was a university library.  So, naturally, $1 million of that is going to a football scoreboard.  Some folks are less than entirely pleased with that development.

I mentioned it last week but I’m mentioning it again today because it’s a darn good cause.  If you don’t know about why authors and illustrators alike (as well as celebs like Al Roker and Nicole Kidman) are painting piggy banks for auction, you should fill yourself in here.  A good cause and you get art.  The bidding just started yesterday, so don’t be left behind. And I know I won’t get it, but this is my own personal favorite piggy:

I already read this four years ago, but with the recent passing of Gene Wilder I saw it included in a Chronicle Books newsletter and just couldn’t resist putting it up again.  It’s Gene Wilder’s handwritten notes on the changes he’d prefer to the Willy Wonka costume he was initially given.  Ole blue eyes himself.

Daily Image:

Maurice Sendak was initially going to design that old movie Return to Oz?!?  Apparently it never happened but he did create a publicity poster for the ad campaign.  Not that it really looks like any of the characters in the movie (I’m working on a couple theories on who the guy on the far right is) but in terms of the book Ozma of Oz, it’s not terrible.

Many many thanks to J.L. Bell at Oz and Ends for this image.  Yet another old post from 2012.  I’m having that kind of a day.

Good morning, campers!  Are we ironing out the last of the holiday season from our socks?  Are we eyeing our decorations with a jaded eye?  Well, wonderful news!  2016 is on the horizon and I bring you news of the peppy variety.  Packed deep in snow, no less, since I appear to be living in ice storm land at the moment.

• First up, I wrote a piece a year or two ago for a periodical and then never had it published.  All that has changed thanks to the delightful online children’s literature publication, The Read Quarterly.  My piece The Last Taboo: What Interactive Print Says About the Digital Revolution is available for your reading, whenever you’d like to give it a gander.

• Two awards to celebrate today.  First up, you may be aware that over in Britain they did away with their beloved Roald Dahl Funny Book Prize.  Apparently there will be a new Dahl prize in the near future and they didn’t want to confuse it with this other one.  Fortunately, there’s a new funny lit prize and it’s called The Laugh Out Loud Award or, for short, The Lollies.  Michael Rosen is, as ever, involved.  Attention!  Britain?  The representative from Illinois would like to request that America be allowed Lollies of our own.  We could change the name slightly to The ROFLs, but that sounds slightly perverse when you say it out loud.  In any case, funny awards here, please.

• The other award is the recent unveiling of the latest winners of the 2015 Arab American Book Award (sponsored by the  Arab American National Museum) given in the Children/Young Adult category.  The winner, I’m happy to say, is The Turtle of Oman by Naomi Shihab Nye (Greenwillow Press).  Honorable Mention was awarded to The Olive Tree by Elsa Marston and illustrated by Claire Ewart (Wisdom Tales Press).  Well done, one and all!

• Insufficiently happy by today’s news thus far?  Okay.  Try this.  They’ve turned some of the Bad Kitty books into a play and you Bay Area lucky ducks get to see it.  Playwright Min Kahng, who also did a musical adaptation of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon amongst other things, is interviewed here.  As for Bad Kitty herself, I like her looks:

• Other me stuff.  I helped contribute to Brightly’s list of The 50 Best Books for 7- and 8-year-olds.  A lot of old favorites are on that one.  Anna Hibiscus.  Rickshaw Girl.  The Penderwicks.  And new ones like Lola Levine and Grandfather Gandhi.  Worth looking at.

• Brightly also came up with 2015’s Biggest Moments in Children’s and YA Literature.  A good list, though I would rewrite the title slightly to say instead that it’s more accurately “2015’s Biggest Controversy-Free Moments in Children’s and YA Literature”.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

A Rita Williams-Garcia book has people talking, but it may not be the book you first think of.  How many of you read her new picture book Bottle Cap Boys Dancing on Royal Street?  Well a recent article about the actual boys who dance the streets of New Orleans says that Rita’s book has gotten people to talking.  The subheading “Depicting happy children” sounds familiar in light of the conversations surrounding A Fine Dessert as well, though the context is different.

• Something to warm the cold cockles of your heart.  I’ll just let the title of the piece speak for itself. Award-winning Canadian picture book a gift for every Syrian refugee family. The book in question?  The magnificent Sidewalk Flowers by JonArno Lawson, illustrated by Sydney Smith. Thanks to Minh Le for the link.

• Aw, heck.  One more.  Tis the season.  From The Washington Post: First Book mixes market forces and philanthropy to help poor children.  I love that they picked up Boats for Papa as one of their titles.  Clearly they have excellent taste.

• Daily Image:

I saw the new Star Wars movie, loved it, and was listening to a recent episode of the podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour when they mentioned the worst Star Wars merchandising in existence.  There are many items that could fit the bill (look up the Slave Leia perfume or the C3PO tape dispenser, if you doubt me) but the unqualified winner was so terrible sounding that I honestly didn’t believe that it existed.  This has nothing to do with children’s literature in any way, shape, or form.  I just wanted to give you a couple new nightmares tonight.  Ladies and gentlemen, the Jar Jar Binks lollipop.  Sharp-eyed spotters may be able to see why it may be considered far and away the worst marketing of all time.

I suspect that even if you have only been writing for children for a short while, if you live in the US (and maybe elsewhere) you will know the name Betsy Bird, who was the Youth Materials Selections Specialist of New … Continue reading →

Forget Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich! Children’s author Nick Bruel has cast the “purrfect” candidate in his latest chapter book: Bad Kitty for President. We’ve embedded the book trailer above.

We caught up with Bruel to ask a few questions about politics, writing and illustrating.

Q: With your latest title, Bad Kitty for President, why did you decide to touch on such a
topical event?
A: I find politics in general to be a very weird, absurd, and sort of wonderful creature in this country. As Americans I think we have a propensity to take politics too seriously (myself included), but at the same time I don’t think many Americans understand our political system as much as they should. It’s a bit like watching a full season of baseball but never really understanding the rules of the game.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

by Nick Bruel

A Bad Kitty Christmas caused me to break three promises I had made to myself.

First, I had promised myself that I would NEVER create another Bad Kitty picture book. It’s not that I didn’t like making them or that I wasn’t proud of the first two: Bad Kitty and Poor Puppy. It’s just that the multiple alphabet format was just too daunting to continue. It’s one reason I came up with the idea to adapt Kitty into a chapter book character. I knew there was much more for this character to do, and having her grow up along with her reader seemed like both a good idea and the perfect escape from the picture book format for her.

The second promise I broke wasn’t so much of a promise as a mindful warning I had made to myself after I completed Little Red Bird. Rhyming books are hard to write. Make that INCREDIBLY hard to write. Make that incredibly FRUSTRATING to write. Plus, all too often authors have been known to rhyme their text because the text itself was not strong enough to hold up on its own as a picture book. Or at least that is the perception by many. After Little Red Bird, which I am quite proud of, I decided that it would a very long time before I even considered writing another rhyming book again.

But the third promise I broke was absolutely the one I thought I would take with me to the grave. I never wanted to do a holiday book.

Not that I had anything against holiday books. Some of the most classic works in the history of children’s books are, of course, holiday books like How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Polar Express. But so many more have come in time for one holiday season and disappeared forever by the time the next holiday season comes around. Having worked for so many years in a children’s bookstore I had seen first hand how publishers would collectively carpet bomb our shelves with brand new Christmas books, and how all of those books that had done so well for us just one year beforehand would become all but completely forgotten. Knowing how difficult it was for me to dedicate as much as nine months of my life to giving birth to each of my books, knowing they would see the light of day on bookstore shelves for only a couple of months at most was just too much to bear.

But break my promises I did, and I broke all three of them at the same time.

Neal Porter and Simon Boughton were both insistent that I still had it in me to create another Bad Kitty picture book. Clearly they had more confidence in my abilities than I did. They also tried to convince me that it was unnecessary for me to maintain the multiple alphabet format, knowing how difficult it was for me. But how could I not? If I had used it for the first two books, it would feel disloyal for me not to do it again for future books. The best I could promise them would be that I would go home and think about it. And I did.

The truth is, I had already given serious consideration to making a Bad Kitty Christmas book. My original concept, one I had contemplated several years ago would be that Kitty would run away from home, bitter that she had not received the presents she wanted, and while wandering through the neighborhood would look through the

5 x 7, colored pencil and oil on illustration board
Available by ebay auction ~ please go here to bid

This one was much more rewarding than the cherries from a couple of posts back. Maybe because I just like chocolate better than I do cherries. Or because I went back to the white background. I just like the way it turned out better.

I'm very tired today, and its always interesting to 'feel' how my brain works when I'm tired vs. when I've had a good night's sleep. I remember back in school, often, in those early morning clothed figure drawing classes, I'd draw a lot better because I wasn't thinking so hard ~ it just kind of 'happened'.
This piece is more finely rendered than those drawing were, and does require some analysis of color and careful application of medium. If I was doing it as more "fine art" kind of piece it might have turned out different. I don't know, I'm babbling.

Why am I tired? One of the cats was out all night (who usually doesn't stay out) so I was a worried kitty parent. He was on the back porch anxious to come in for breakfast when we got up, and was perfectly fine and very pleased with himself for managing an all-night outing. Bad kitty.

Its back to being a children's book illustrator now for a while. I'll post!

What book got you hooked on reading?

An advocacy group called First Book celebrated giving its 50 millionth book given to children in need. They asked people to tell them what book got them hooked on reading. Here are the top 50. Celebrities weigh in with their picks.

So much to choose! I remember falling in love with alphabet flashcards. Reading Swiss Family Robinson over and over. Reading Evelyn Marie Lampman's books. Or Andre Norton's. Or Beverly Cleary's. Or Judy Blume's.

What about you?





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