More Picture Book Research

Tonight is my writers' group meeting, and I'll be bringing my picture book manuscript. Again. Yes, you may well wonder how long it takes to write a picture book. It takes me a while.

At any rate, today I'm offering you some more humor picture books from my research on same. I'm talking just two authors.

Mo Willems

I've certainly heard plenty about Mo Williams over the years, but when I read one of his books years ago, I was impressed by the illustrations but not so much the text. Now that I've read his Pigeon books, though, I totally get him.

Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! and Don't Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late! are funny in concept and in incredibly simple execution. On top of that, I think few children will be able to resist interacting with the adult reading these to them.

I want to read these to somebody!

William Joyce

William Joyce is an author I've liked for a long time.  The retro, intensely representative art work...the slightly twisted narratives... Love it all.

Billy's Booger, A Memoir is a very clever, funny-in-a-subtle-way, picture book for older kids, older kids who have experienced writing stories for school. The story involves a fourth-grade boy writing a kids' book for a contest. His entry, Billy's Booger, The memoir of a little green nose buddy, appears in the center of the book on smaller, colored pages, with its text looking as if handwritten, its illustrations appearing as if done by a gradeschooler.  You get a real book within a book.

Memoir seems like a neat genre to discuss with and teach young kids, since it would help them understand how their lives can become material for their writing.

I had suggestions for humor picture books from a couple of people the last time I posted about them. I haven't forgotten. At some point, I'll be taking a look at those titles.

Working On Sunday?

The summer yoga sanctuary

Last week I had to make a decision. Should I spend today doing a couple of hours of yard work, a little baking, some reading, spend twenty minutes in the summer yoga sanctuary, watch the season finale of The Americans? Or should I attend a NESCBWI day-program, Building Your Community of Readers and Advocates? It would be really funny, if, after all that build-up, I said, "I did some yoga and watched The Americans." But, no, of course I went to the NESCBWI program. You know I'm a sucker for the whole community building thing, and I like those day-long programs. They're deep and extended without getting ridiculous about it the way, say, an MFA would.

Kirsten Cappy

This was a marketing program led by Kirsten Cappy of Curious City, a children’s book consulting company that creates marketing projects that focus on engaging readers. The focus of today's event was on discovery rather than traditional selling. Hmm. I don't think I heard a word about making bookmarks and postcards. No book launch parties. I could probably live without those.

I have to go to Twitter to look for the new people I met.

And I still watched the season finale of The Americans.

UPDATE: At today's program, someone brought up William Carlos Williams' The Red Wheelbarrow. Read it. Then read this about it.

I do recall who mentioned this poem, but I don't want to get into it, because she's working on a project related to it. If it works out, I will most certainly bring it up again.

What Did You Do This Week, Gail? June 6 Edition

Goal 1. Adhere to Goals and Objectives. Not bad.

Goal 2. Prepare Mummy Hunters for Submission. I'm reworking the beginning, with a new first chapter for starters. This is partly due to feedback, partly due to a book I read post-NESCBWI Conference.

Goal 3. Generate New Short Work/Programs.

• I've nearly finished reworking an essay, using ideas from a podcast and that book I mentioned above. (Multiplier!)
• I also made a submission

Goal 5. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding

• Weekend Writer Blogging For Writers post--Promoted to Google+, Google+ community, and Twitter
• Tassy Walden Award post--Promoted to Google+, Facebook, and Twitter
• TMT post--Promoted to Facebook, Google+, and Twitter
• Horn Book post--Promoted to Google+, Facebook community, and Twitter
• Added more material to CCLC and reposted it to Facebook and Twitter because of this weekend's Barnes & Noble Teen Festival.
• Working on a Pinterest project
• Registered for a NESCBWI program on using community for marketing. It's happening this Sunday. Yes, I cut it kind of close.

Goal 6. Generate New Work: Reading Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town in relation to the NaNoWriMo project I'm considering. Also, been making some notes.

Am I using anything I learned at the NESCBWI Conference? The book I read, and will blog about at some point, has had an impact on three writing projects I worked on this week.

Horn Book Stuff

I'm actually caught up on my Horn Book reading. What I am is behind in telling the world about it. So I'm just going to take a quick dip into all my Horn Book thoughts. Too much of a good thing and all that.

March/April 2016 Issue

The Beverly Cleary Birthday issue also had a very interesting article by Betty Carter called Escaping Series Mania. (Oh, wow. I just realized. Cleary wrote series.) Carter suggests that "An exclusive diet of early series books might limit rather than expand reading competence." Because series books are so predictable--same narrative voice, same characters, same situations--readers aren't being exposed to much that's new, to much that will push them as readers. Instead of using their reading skills to help them comprehend what they're reading, they use what they already know about the series to do that.

Well, I thought that was fascinating.

At the back of this issue is a two-page selection of reviews of narrative nonfiction from The Horn Book Guide. Included is Big Top Burning: The True Story of an Arsonist, a Missing Girl, and the Greatest Show on Earth by Laura A. Woolett. Woolett is writing about what's known in these parts as the Hartford Circus Fire. It is impossible to exaggerate how large that disaster has loomed in central Connecticut history. And I'm speaking as someone who wasn't born when this happened and didn't move to the area until 35 years later. Just sayin'.

May/June 2016

My favorite article from the collaboration issue was Translator: Trafficking Between Cultures by Elena Abos. When you consider that it's all I can do to read the French jokes my cousin e-mails me, I seem to have a bizarre interest in translation right now.

In the Of Professional Interest section of the magazine: Patty Campbell (with Chris Crowe) has written Spirituality in Young Adult Literature: The Last Taboo. Campbell used to write regularly for The Horn Book. I loved her columns.

The Horn Book Podcast

 

Roger Sutton and Sian Gaetano have a podcast. I listened to one during a cooking binge. I don't know which podcast, I'm sorry to say. I made a couple of notes that don't include that information.

Here's the information I did take down: Sutton said that book reviews are news. A newly published book is news because...it is new. The reviewer is reporting on news.

I have never thought of reviews that way, but this makes the incredibly narrow window for getting attention for new books make sense. That is the period of time when those books are new and news.

It still stinks for the hundreds, if not thousands, of books that won't be considered newsworthy enough (due to content, the writer's history, etc.) to be professionally reviewed. But at least now I have a better understanding of the stinkage.

Time Management Tuesday: Completion Bias

You know how hard it is to get started on a big, new writing project? Heard those stories about writers who work at home cleaning the bathroom when they're supposed to be working? And what about the serious draw of all those little social media marketing responsibilities? Do they call to you when you're supposed to be starting an entire revision?

It appears that there's a logical reason for all that. Not to say that the logical reason is a good thing. Just an explanation.

Completion Bias Is Natural!

In The One Cognitive Bias That Could Be Derailing Your Productivity at Where Marketers Go to Grow Lindsay Kolowich says, "completion bias is our natural tendency to focus too much on tasks that are easy to complete -- often at the expense of the tasks that are more important." We go for little tasks because we like the psychological reward when we complete things. Complete one big task that takes a long time and get just one reward, or complete a number of little tasks and get more rewards? We get to choose.

Even if the little jobs are real tasks that need to be completed--promoting this blog post with tweets, for instance, or prepping for a writers' group meeting--working on them first means we're not getting to a big job. A new draft. A #!!@ synopsis. 

How To Get Around Completion Bias

Kolowich suggests two approaches:

1. Choosing the most important task from your To Do list and working on that first, no matter its size.
2. Breaking a big job into smaller jobs, so you've created small, easier to complete tasks.

I think this subject would be worth at least one more post. So next week I'll write a bit about how completion bias connects with other time management issues I've discussed here.

Tassy Walden Awards Ceremony

© Judith L. Barbosa

Connecticut's 2016 Tassy Walden Award winners were announced last month. The awards ceremony was held last week. Thanks to writers' group colleague Holly Howley and the Shoreline Arts Alliance, which sponsors the award, I can provide you with a photograph from that event.

Who are these people? Starting from the left:

Lauren Miller, CT Humanities,  Doug Fisher, Executive Director CT Humanities, Holly Howley, Winner Young Adult Novel, Linda Zajac, Winner Picture Book Text, Wendell Minor, keynote speaker, Florence Minor, Melanie Meehan, Winner Middle Grade Novel, Tim Perra, Winner Illustrated Picture Book, Doe Boyle, Chair, Tassy Walden Awards Committee, Eric Dillner, CEO/Executive Director Shoreline Arts Alliance.

Check out Linda Zajac's account of the ceremony.

Many Connecticut authors who have won this award have gone on to publication. So, good luck to all.

The Weekend Writer: Blogging For Writers

Whether or not writers should blog is discussed and written about a lot. And, of course, almost everything you see and hear will tell you that you should, no matter what point you're at in your writing career.

You Should

The May/June issue of Writer's Digest includes an article called Blog Your Way to Success by Robert Lee Brewer. I think the title is a little optimistic, myself, but there's lots of good, short content in this piece. Pay particle attention to the SEO Cheat Sheet. And under Other Ways to Grow Blog Traffic I recommend Share Posts on Social Media. No one's going to come looking for you these days.

You Should But...

Jane Friedman had a post at her site back in March called How to Start Blogging: A Definitive Guide for Authors. That title was a little odd, too, because the first paragraph included the line "The average author does not benefit much from blogging." This isn't quite the "rah-rah, you go, this is going to be fun" piece you usually see related to writers blogging. It has a lot of great material, some of it similar to Brewer's, some of it unique. For instance, Friedman covers a few things about blogging that a lot of writers have trouble with. Frequency of posts, for example. I've seen blogs in which authors go months between posts, maybe doing even just a few posts a year. Friedman says new bloggers should commit to three to five times a week. Once they're established, they can relax a bit a cut back to a couple...a week.

Both articles are good reads for writers either thinking about blogging or actually into it.

The 48-Hour Book Challenge: That's A Wrap

At the end of May, 2006  I signed up for the first 48-Hour Book Challenge, the inspiration of Pam Coughlin at  MotherReader.  I did a magical realism tour for my first book challenge with seven stops. I took part in 2007 and 2008 and again in 2014 and 2015.

The 48-Hour Book Challenge was a reading and blogging binge. You picked 48-hours over a 3-day weekend Pam selected, usually at the beginning of June, and during that period read as much as you could of whatever you wanted and blogged about the books you completed. Because that's what litbloggers do. There was a list of participating bloggers at Pam's site so you knew which of your friends were reading and blogging with you. There were prizes.

No 48-Hour Book Challenge this year. Pam/MotherReader is calling it a day, figuring ten years is a good wrap-up point. There may be some interest in bringing it back next year, but for now the Challenge is a happy memory.

Some litbloggers who were around back then refer to the mid '00s as the Golden Age of Blogging. As I'm sure I've said before, I think of that time as a wild west/frontier experience. There were no instructions on how to blog, no talk of writers building platform, no articles on why writers need blogs or how they can get by with a blog instead of a website. Internet book bullying was still in the future. No one had come up with ways to use blogs to market books. No one had started companies organizing blog tours for writers. Magazines weren't sponsoring blogs.

Because we sponsored ourselves! Yeah! Ya just went out and blogged in those days! Sink or swim. Blog free or die hard.

Blogging was truly social media then, at least in the childlit world, because bloggers interacted, commenting on each others' work and posting links to one another. You were part of a community. Kind of an underground community. Which was cool. The 48-Hour Book Challenge was an on-line ball for the childlit blogging world.

Well, nostalgia isn't healthy. So let's hitch up our big blogger pants, toss back a little of whatever we like to toss back when we're paying tribute, and get back to whatever bloggy things we do these days. And Twitter. I'm going over to Twitter when I'm done here.

We had some good times, Book Challenge. Have fun in retirement.

A Last Visit To The UConn Co-op's Storrs Location

Last week the Connecticut children's literature community learned that there will be no Connecticut Children's Book Fair this fall. This came about because UConn's bookstore will no longer be run by a co-op but by Barnes and Noble. All the UConn bookstores at all its campuses will soon be B&N stores. After June 7, I've heard.

Why, yes, I do have a new shirt.

Yesterday I was in beautiful downtown Storrs and paid a visit to the UConn Co-op Bookstore at Storrs Center, a satellite of the college bookstore that opened just a few years ago. Sixty-percent off select books! It, too, will be a Barnes and Noble store, soon, though a small one.

I've heard Co-op staff have an opportunity to move to the new chain. Things could work out for them, at least.

The offerings in an independent bookstore are often different from those you find in chains. You sometimes see things you've never even heard of. Edgy things. Lovely things.

"I am the one. Take me home."

When I'm in an independent bookstore, I like to walk around until a book tells me it's supposed to go home with me. Today I was waiting for a book with a sixty-percent discount to tell me that. Finally, one did, Terry Pratchett's A Slip of the Keyboard, a collection of his nonfiction, which I had never heard of. I had heard of Fay Weldon's memoir, Auto da Fay. It was on a discount shelf, and now it is on mine.

These may be the last books I buy in that particular store building. I have no objections to Barnes & Nobles. In fact, I appreciate that, in this state, at least, the chain seems to be becoming more active with promoting childlit writers by providing them with appearance opportunities. However, as a general rule I have to say that B&N books don't call to me the way indie store books do.

More Fearless Plant Hunting!

I picked up The Forbidden Orchid by Sharon Biggs Waller (who is rather fascinating) because I liked Waller's earlier book, A Mad, Wicked Folly, and because The Forbidden Orchid is about the search for botanical treasures during the nineteenth century. During that period, botanists went out into lesser known parts of the world hunting for new, unknown plants just as Egyptologists hunted for tombs and paleontologists hunted for dinosaurs. I am fascinated by the incredible thirst for knowledge people experienced in those days and the total lack of respect for other cultures that often accompanied it.

The Forbidden Orchid takes a very long time getting to the material that interested me. The first half of the book deals with our protagonist, Elodie's, narrow, Victorian life at home while her father is off hunting for plants in China. Waller does feminist history well in her books, but as good as that was I wanted to move on to the plants.

Then there is an odd love interest section that I was impatient with, because I wanted to move on to the plants. But I have to admit, teen Gail would have stayed up late reading that part.

And then we get to the hunt for plants! Politics! History!

The book has what I think could be called a feminist ending. Actually, I could get into a sequel, especially if it started with plants! Politics! History!