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The new "Powerpuff Girls" revival gets its first Emmy nod, and so does the last episode of "Phineas and Ferb."

The post 2016 Emmy Nominations: Just the Animation Categories, Please appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Check out the just-dropped preview pages from the upcoming series from Titan.

Titan has licensed the Golden Globe-nominated show and will produce a companion comic storyline to the television series to debut this Spring.

Observations and tips from a first-time attendee of the world's largest animation festival.

by Laurel Snyder

I’ll let you in on a secret—I’m not really an author. Actually, I’m a poet who has managed to trick a bunch of people (including some very nice editors and a terrific agent) into believing I’m an author. I’m sneaky like that.

For me, the work of writing prose is hard. All those words! My novels tend to shrink a lot, before they grow. I revise and edit myself so heavily that the pages melt away. My background in poetry, and my love of precise language, doesn’t lend itself well to the mad dash—the word-sprint—you have to do when you draft a novel.

But picture books? Ahhhhhh, picture books! Picture books are so much like poems. With their economy of language and their image-heavy text, picture books do much the same work poetry does. I actually enjoy the feeling of trying and failing and shelving an idea, because with picture books, you can just start over again with something else. I love seeing art come in from my illustrator, finding out what my words looked like inside an artist’s head. But best of all, I love the beginning of a picture book, the burst of a new project.

I have a huge junk file on my laptop called JUNK, and it is absolutely filled with documents that are “new beginnings.” Empty documents with only a title or a single line in them.

See, as a poet, I don’t really come up with “ideas for picture books” so much as I dream up little spurts of language, lines of text from which a picture book can grow. For me, the beginning is more about the way a few words sound together than it is about an “idea.”

Let me explain. I’ll use as my example my first book. INSIDE THE SLIDY DINER grew out of my career as a waitress, so if I had begun with an idea, I’d have written down, “make a picture book about a diner.” Instead I wrote down, “Inside the Slidy Diner, the Greasy Spoon of stuck.” I didn’t even know it was a picture book when I began it. At first I thought of it as the first line of a prose poem. I had no idea that I’d invent a character named Edie, or that the diner would be a kind of pseudo-magical place, or that there would be a funny cast of characters. I only had the internal rhyme of “sliiiiiiidy diiiiiiner” and the alliteration of “ssssssspoon of sssssstuck.” But the story sprang from that language.

Likewise, the JUNK file I mentioned earlier is full of lines that I’m not sure about yet. In each case, I don’t know what my idea is exactly, or what the story is about. I only know that I liked the way a few words sounded in my head. Maybe you can help me puzzle them out. Here are a few:

1. Doctor Delete
2. The spoon of wishful thinking
3. What the wind wants
4. The Boring Book
5. My Iffiest Scritch
6. Dirty Curls
7. Boy Who Caught His Death

See what I mean? These are not ideas. They could still head off in a million different directions. They’re just words, that sound nice, in the right order.

So now, as an exercise, for other folks who are equally language driven, I might suggest that instead of trying to think up a pict

(nice example of a “Penny Dreadful”)

So, I’m in the throes of NaNoWriMo, and I have to say… I’m really nervous about what I’ve written so far on “Penny”.  Can I really put copious vomiting, neurotic parent spoofs,  and a child taxidermist in the same book?

Right now everything feels off kilter and fluffy. Everything feels messy.  I know this is only a first draft, but I’m scared.

I wonder if others are NaNoWriMoing books under contract? I wonder if this was a mistake.  If the “serious” nature of work that’s been sold and the zany/spontaneous nature of slamming out 1500 words a day are incompatible.

I console myself with the fact that I always have time to do-over if this is a miserable failure. I also console myself with the fact that I’m a much better rewriter than I am a writer.  Something learned in all those years of poetry workshop makes me a very tight tinkerer, and terrible at just throwing words onto a page.

But right now I’m nervous.

One other, unrelated, note… I’ve been re-reading Gone Away Lake, because there are things I need to learn from it to write this… and I’m struck by the (Joe and Beth Krush) art in the book.  It looks SO MUCH like the (LeUyen Pham) art for Any Which Wall.  Which is AWESOME. But weird.