What's Happening In The Spring SCBWI Bulletin?

Do you have a copy of the Spring, 2019 Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrator Bulletin? Can you get one?

My favorite articles:

• Isn't That a Coincidence? by Joelle Anthony. Yes, it's about dealing with or avoiding coincidence in your writing.
• Verbs Make All the Difference in Nonfiction by Anthony D. Fredericks. Pretty obvious, right?
• Prepublication Marketing by Darcy Pattison. This will be of particular interest to self-publishers. It includes a few things I hadn't heard before.

Go forth and read, children's writers. And other writers. And anybody.

Have You Read The Summer "SCBWI Bulletin?" I Have.

Hard as it is to believe, the Summer 2016 SCBWI Bulletin arrived just a couple of days ago, and...I have already read it! I know! I sometimes get a couple of issues behind.

If you are a SCBWI member and your Bulletin is floating around the house, here are some  articles I recommend:

10 Ways to Gear Up for the Coming School Year by Alexis O'Neill. There were a couple of things new to me. One of them being the Five-Year Rule.

On Series by Bonnie Bader. What I found so interesting about this article is that Bader says that series are a great way "to hook kids into reading." This is a different spin on series Betty Carter's in the March/April Horn Book. Though she was more concerned with series' impact on reading competence than whether or not they encouraged children to read.

Art Tips by Manuela Pentangelo. It's about Pinterest.

And my writers' group colleague Jane Sutcliffe has a big part in the Bologna Children's Book Fair story about Melissa Stewart's Feathers. That's an interesting article, too, even if you don't know Jane. Or Melissa.

Some Professional Reading

I dropped the new issues of the SCBWI Bulletin and The Horn Book into the tub last week. Yeah, that's into a tub that had water in it. I managed to pull the pages apart enough so I could finish reading them, and the magazines have been sitting on the edge of the tub, all dried, hard, and wrinkled, ever since. Though the method of communication is the worse for wear, the content being communicated is still meaningful.

One of The Horn Book's articles I want to hold back and talk about in November, when I'm planning to focus on picture books more than I usually do because of Picture Book Month. Among the reviews I noticed was one for The Waffler by Gail Donovan, which I mention because Gail was one of the first people I met through NESCBWI. I saw another for the first in a new series, Lockwood & Co., by Jonathan Stroud, author of the Bartimaeus books, a definite favorite of mine. Lockwood & Co is described in The Horn Book as "part procedural," which I like and "part ghost story," which I don't. The procedural aspect and the Bartimaeus connection are enough to get me to give this book a try. Three of the books on the longlist for the 2013 National Book Award were also reviewed in this issue: Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures by Kate DiCamillo, The Real Boy by Anne Ursu, and Boxers and Saints by Gene Luen Yang.

My favorite article in  the SCBWI Bulletin was The Ins and Outs of Write-ins by Wendy Henrichs and Colleen Kelly. A write-in is a gathering at which writers write. They are there to work. Write-ins don't take time away from writing the way critique groups do. Why gather to write instead of writing alone? I'm assuming lunch or breakfast could be involved.

Both publications carried an article on The ABC of It: Why Children's Books Matter, an exhibition at the New York Public Library. The Horn Book article was written by Leonard S. Marcus who curated the exhibit and happens to be my favorite children's book historian. Or maybe my favorite literary historian, period.